My Own Private Idaho had a few things going for it:

- It's Shakespeare's Falstaff cycle, and anything with Falstaff in it is beloved by actors who get annoyed that the audience mostly wants Romeo & Juliet, Hamlet and Midsummer Night's Dream.

- It's six years after Kiss of the Spider Woman, which was nominated for four Academy Awards (and won William Hurt his Oscar).

- "Movies with songs in the titles" were a thing at the time (Peggy Sue Got Married, La Bamba, Pretty Woman, Lean On Me) and "quirky cult hit from the '70s" perfectly matched Van Sant's absolutely puny budget. There were lots of scripts floating around at the time where the racy stuff ended up getting cut in the edit; executives probably figured the end result would be much tamer when it was released but it wasn't.

- Van Sant REALLY REALLY WANTED IT TO HAPPEN.

River Phoenix is good in it. Keanu Reeves is good in it. The guy who plays Falstaff in it is really good but you never see him again which I think says a lot about the way the industry regarded My Own Private Idaho. Really, if you want an explanation for Private Idaho it's that it's the movie that most shows what River Phoenix could have become which, combined with the age of the ascendancy of Blockbuster, made it a rental favorite. "Whoa! A River Phoenix movie I've never heard of! Holy shit it's about gay dudes... Hey Julie you'll never believed what I watched last night!"

Certain movies are what they are because of VHS.