Is Shawshank Redemption the best box office bomb of all time?

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When the film hit screens, it didn't do so in a vacuum. In fact, The Shawshank Redemption had the distinct misfortune of having its wide release the same weekend as one of the most popular movies to come out of the '90s.

When The Shawshank Redemption hit theaters across America on October 14, 1994, it wasn't alone. An indie flick from an exciting new voice in contemporary cinema that had wowed audiences at the Cannes Film Festival was also making its wide theatrical debut the very same day. That movie was Pulp Fiction, and it sucked most of the air out of the room when it was released.

Of course, one movie's success doesn't automatically result in another's failure. However, it's clear that when it came time to pick which of those two critically-lauded grownup dramas to see, audiences overwhelmingly chose Pulp Fiction.

As for why the movie had much greater success at home than in theaters, Tim Robbins suggested the movie gets better the longer you sit with it. In his Entertainment Weekly interview, he said, "[T]he immediate reaction at that time wasn't as important as whether the film would have life in video and on cable. And when given a chance, when people actually started to see the movie, it became something that was a movie that people had to watch several times."

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