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

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It was the perfect run time to show on TNT TBS etc. to fill in primetime viewing before either network got original shows.

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Even before that, though, I remember Shawshank was featured on Pay Per View for an extremely long run.

I don’t remember exactly when PPV movies on the Tocom box took off, but I remember that preview for Shawshank playing on The Prevue Channel for what seemed like a year...”I order you to serve two life sentences back to back”.

I know PPV movies and Prevue Channel were around earlier in the 90s because I remember a few other previews from earlier movies, notably Highlander II The Quickening in 91 because I watched that many times , and Jacob’s Ladder (another Robbins flick) in 90 because it always creeped me out something fierce, but I think that mid 90s to early 2000s run before TiVo and DVR came around was probably peak influence for ordering new releases on cable instead of going to Blockbuster and Shawshank was right at the front of that era.

For you youngsters that don’t remember the Prevue Channel, you could spend hours watching that scroll looking for a specific channel, then look away for a few seconds and miss it and have to wait for another round You’d usually just end up ordering a movie after an hour or so of that, and Shawshank was always a go to in 1995.


I think that’s where it really became the hit that it was, and that’s why TNT paid to basically play it on a loop for a decade or so.

All about The Prevue Channel