Some films, such as the Oscar-winning 1939 civil war epic Gone With the Wind, resonate with audiences on release, but others, such as Frank Capra's 1946 yuletide tale It's a Wonderful Life, take time to become part of the cultural lexicon.
In that latter category is The Shawshank Redemption, which languished at the box office upon its cinematic release in the autumn of 1994, but became enormously popular on home video and cable after receiving seven Oscar nominations including for best film, lead actor (for Morgan Freeman) and adapted screenplay (for writer-director Frank Darabont).
Last week, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences celebrated the 20th anniversary of the humanistic prison drama, which didn't end up with any Academy Awards. Today, however, it is No1 on the Internet Movie Database (IMDb)'s Top 250 list of films as voted by the website's users.
Darabont believes audiences initially stayed away because it was a prison movie without any action. "It looked to the casual observer like a spoonful of medicine," he says. "One of those movies that just kind of looks like it's going to be a difficult chore to sit through."
The filmmaker says the turning point was the Oscar nominations. "Nobody had heard of the movie, [but] that year on the Oscar broadcast, they were mentioning this movie seven times," he says.
The academy's director of programming, Bernardo Rondeau, believes the film has become a modern-day favourite because "it balances humour and poignancy".