Nearly half of the film's production budget of $2.2 million went on Sinatra's salary for his performance. On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, "The Manchurian Candidate" holds an approval rating of 96% rating based on 57 reviews, with an average rating of 8.66/10. The website's critical consensus reads: "A classic blend of satire and political thriller that was uncomfortably prescient in its own time, "The Manchurian Candidate" remains distressingly relevant today." On Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, the film has a score of 94 out of 100, based on 20 critics, indicating "universal acclaim". Film critic Roger Ebert listed "The Manchurian Candidate" on his "Great Movies" list, declaring that it is "inventive and frisky, takes enormous chances with the audience, and plays not like a 'classic' but as a work as alive and smart as when it was first released". In 1994 "The Manchurian Candidate" was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant". The film ranked at No. 67 on the "AFI's 100 Years...100 Movies" when that list was first compiled in 1998, but a 2007 revised version excluded it. It was also No. 17 on AFI's "AFI's 100 Years...100 Thrills" lists. In April 2007, Angela Lansbury's character was selected by "Time" as one of the 25 greatest villains in cinema history. According to a false rumor, Sinatra removed the film from distribution after the John F. Kennedy assassination on November 22, 1963. Michael Schlesinger, who was responsible for the film's 1988 reissue by MGM/UA, denies the rumor. According to him the film was not removed, but there was little public interest in it immediately before the assassination. Newspaper display ads indicate that after the assassination, it was not rereleased as frequently or as widely as other movies from 1962, but it was indeed revived and never was banned. The movie played at a Brooklyn, New York cinema two months after the assassination (January 1964) and subsequently was televised nationwide on “CBS Thursday Night at the Movies” on September 16, 1965. Sinatra's representatives acquired rights to the film in 1972 after the initial contract with United Artists expired. The film was rebroadcast on nationwide television in April 1974 on "NBC Saturday Night at the Movies".