Of course not; that’s an Easter movie.
Okay c’mon now. For decades it was free for stations to air because of a copyright quirk so stations aired it constantly around Christmas.
It literally ends with the main character running through the streets screaming “Merry Christmas!”
It’s a Christmas movie. For me it’s my Christmas movie. I watched it every year with my Mom around the holidays.
I don’t want to hijack this thread with an extension of the Die Hard debate, so I’ll just say that I agree to disagree. 
(I should have put “in my opinion” above!)
Thanks! It might be time for me to finally read the story. 
Especially when you watch it with the lost ending.
Actually, it was released to general audiences on Jan. 7, 1947, but its official release date was Dec. 20, 2046, when it premiered in NYC, and it was playing in several cities, like Minneapolis, by Christmas.
Not quite.
Sure it’s not the end but it’s the climax of the film.
One of the feeliest of feel-good Christmas movies.
This is what the Hallmark Christmas movies wanna be.
Is it a legitimate argument that the sentiment in the film is the sort of thing people will suspend their disbelief for around Christmas time, and actually seek out and enjoy around this time, when sentiment is the zeitgeist, but other times of the year, the film wouldn’t “work” (people would not suspend their disbelief, or react cynically), and for that reason, it is a film that belongs to the Christmas season?
Merry Christmas…
That’s really good!
Just to be clear, I didn’t actually make that and post it on YouTube, I just did a search for “It’s a Wonderful Life trailer thriller”.
There’s all kinds of those ‘misleading’ trailers out there: a ‘Mary Poppins’ horror trailer, a ‘The Shining’ feel-good family comedy trailer. I figured there was probably already a thriller cut for IaWL.
New? I had a girlfriend 35 years ago whose whole family was adamant that it was a Thanksgiving movie because George learns to give thanks for what he has and the town gives him thanks for what he’s done for them… or something…
Not my theory. I never felt the need to pigeon hole it in the first place. But that sure looks an awful lot like a Christmas tree at the end.
George’s suicide attempt, if you want to call it that, and Clarence’s washing George out of Bedford Falls/:Pottersville happens on Christmas Eve,
The plot crumbles without the Christmas tree and Suzu and the ringing bell when Clarence got wings.
Definitely a Christmas movie. Unlike, of course, Die Hard.
I don’t think it works. The movie is just too upbeat, too good. It’s maybe parody-proof?
George does have a reason for suicide. The bank is going to show $8000 (like $129K now) loss and it certainly has the smell of embezzlement. Especially with Potter’s sure to be gelpful testimony (“He’s running around giving money to that hussy Violet Bick.”)
Drunkard Uncle Billy should go to jail, but George is too nice, to much a doormat to let him take the fall. George has been a doormat all his life, probably from birth. It’s his lot in life. So he would have taken the fall. Until he got the damn fool idea to kill himself.
In our normal world, he’d just be dead. It sure would be a shock when he “wakes up” as a tree in the sand desert plains of hell. “Well, I guess that didn’t help!” Especially when he finds Uncle Billy rooted next to him.
thank you for all those clips; I enjoyed them!
Is there one where The Passion of the Christ is just about a family getting together for Passover?
I think much of the movie is plenty dark, and I thought the fake trailer worked pretty well to portray the movie as a Hitchcockian thriller / mystery.
I don’t know if you’d call those misleading movie trailers ‘parody’ exactly, even; to me parody is when you directly satirize the point of a subject’s source material. These fake trailers are more of a humorous way to demonstrate how creative editing can really shape a narrative.
But I will agree that some of those fake trailers have an uphill battle with their source material, like this one…
I did find this one where the story is reframed as an 80s-style action comedy, but I don’t think it works all that well, considering the visuals they had to work with…