We opened the film in February 1988 to fabulous reviews and tremendous business, and it has stayed available for theaters, TV and home entertainment ever since. The reaction was so overwhelming that MGM/UA immediately struck a new - and much fairer - deal to reacquire the rights. By then, Sinatra had new attorneys with no ax to grind and they consented.
Īnd so it remained “lost” until 1987, when the New York Film Festival requested it for its 25th anniversary.
#Movies like the manchurian candidate movie
When the time came to renew in 1972, Sinatra’s attorneys opted to take the movie back and bury their “mistake”. The original deal was for 10 years, and it was, to put it charitably, not a very good one. Michael Schlesinger, the man responsible for the film’s eventual re-release by MGM/UA Classics in 1988, explained in a 2008 letter to the Los Angeles Times why the movie had gone unseen for a fifteen-year period:īy late 1963, the film had simply played out. The Manchurian Candidate was withdrawn from distribution by Frank Sinatra in 1972 (a state in which it remained for the next fifteen years), but that act was a business decision that had nothing to do with political events. The film was broadcast by CBS in 19, and again by NBC at least twice in the 1970s. The Manchurian Candidate did seemingly “disappear” for a few years around the time of the Kennedy assassination, not because it had been “suppressed” but simply because its original theatrical run had largely played out by then (it had already been in release for a year), and - as was typical in that day - a couple of years elapsed before it was leased by its distributor (United Artists) to network television and scheduled for broadcast. People may have thought about a possible link between The Manchurian Candidate and the JFK assassination at the time, however, the film was not withdrawn from distribution at the end of 1963, nor was its later unavailability due to any connection with the events in Dallas.