What killed the Christmas movie?

Is the end ding-dong-merrily-on-nigh for a once-important part of the movie calendar? There was a time when, each December, audiences flocked to cinemas to experience Christmas blockbusters: festive multiplex crowd-pleasers designed to make spirits bright (and major studios considerably richer). Last month, though, came a reminder of just how drastically things might have changed. Red One, an action comedy about a kidnapped Santa Claus, didn’t just endure brutal reviews, it also suffered the ignominy of the opening weekend equivalent of a stocking full of coal, making back a miserly $32.1m (£25m) against its $250m (£196m) budget. This, despite a cast led by two of mainstream cinema’s biggest names: Marvel’s Chris Evans and Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson.

Theories about the Amazon-backed caper’s underperformance have varied. Some have suggested that audiences didn’t want “Jingle Bell, Jingle Bell, Jingle Bell Rock” – if you’ll excuse the pun – with Johnson’s star power appearing to be on the wane (just look at how his Black Adam franchise failed to launch in 2022). Others have blamed confusion over the film’s target audience; Red One occupies “an ill-considered audience no man’s land, too intense for little kids ... and too bland to attract teens and genre fans”, Wendy Ide wrote in The Observer. In Hollywood and internally at Amazon, though, many point to an assumption among consumers that the movie would be available to watch at home on Prime Video by Christmas, so what was the point in schlepping out to the cinema and paying for tickets? (And they were right: Red One arrived on Prime yesterday.)

But there may be another reason entirely. Red One’s stuttering rollout is another example of Hollywood studios having seemingly lost both the desire to make festive movies, and the knowhow on what makes them connect with moviegoers. In other words, it’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas blockbusters have found themselves on a cultural naughty list – unwanted by audiences and mismanaged by studios.

Christmas movies still exist, of course. America’s Hallmark channel has spawned a cottage industry of schmaltzy romcoms so popular that Netflix have begun following suit with films such as this year’s Hot Frosty – about a hunky snowman who comes to life. And then there are low-budget comedy specials such as Prime’s Jack in Time for Christmas, in which Jack Whitehall races across America with the likes of Rebel Wilson and Michael Bublé. But Christmas blockbusters – the sort designed to storm the box office – are unarguably in decline.

“There does seem to be fewer of them, and fewer that bring people together the way Christmas movies once did,” admits Canadian director Michael Dowse, whose 2021 comedy 8-Bit Christmas is one of the rare recent festive movies financed by a major studio (Warner Bros) to have struck a chord, albeit on streaming. The 51-year-old grew up in an era of near-constant Christmas releases, one of which in particular he cites as a major factor in his decision to become a filmmaker: “I rented [National Lampoon’s] Christmas Vacation from Blockbuster and never returned it. I must have watched that movie 70 times,” he laughs. That film, he points out, was released in 1989 – slap bang within a five-year period that would see Home Alone, Die Hard, Scrooged, Edward Scissorhands, The Muppet Christmas Carol, Batman Returns, Die Hard 2, Home Alone 2: Lost in New York and The Nightmare Before Christmas snowball into cinemas.

Just compare that burst of releases to today. Sure, there is the occasional cult hit by an indie auteur, such as Alexander Payne’s The Holdovers, Greta Gerwig’s Little Women or Todd Haynes’s Carol. But gone are the days, seemingly, when the December box office is ruled by festive spectacles. Among the 20 highest-grossing Christmas movies of all time are just three films from the last decade, all of which plummet out of the rankings when older films’ box office receipts are adjusted for inflation. Those three films are 2018 animation The Grinch, forgotten Mark Wahlberg comedy Daddy’s Home 2, and The Nutcracker and the Four Realms – a movie that lost Disney a reported $65m and is considered one of the biggest flops in recent Mouse House history.

On popular American film podcast The Big Picture last week, host Sean Fennessey suggested that 2003 might have been the last year in which festive movies made a dent in the zeitgeist, with Elf and Love Actually among that year’s releases. Hollywood reporter Jeff Sneider, whose newsletter The InSneider tracks projects in development and observes Tinseltown trends, is inclined to agree. “They’re the domain of streaming now, mostly. Last night, I stayed up and watched Nutcrackers, a new Ben Stiller [Disney+] movie,” he says. “Fifteen years ago, that would have had a theatrical release. Carry-On is another example, right? That’s a new Netflix Christmas action movie, with Taron Egerton and Jason Bateman. Once, these movies would have been in theatres.” Now, though, they appear on streaming services, where they’re liable to get lost in a platforms’ bottomless bucket of content. (Remember 2022’s Spirited, starring Will Ferrell and Ryan Reynolds? How about 2023’s Candy Cane Lane, with Eddie Murphy? Neither does anyone else.)

open image in gallery

Others suggest that the cultural decline of the Christmas movie has everything to do with our changing tastes. “It’s the Deadpool-ification of movies that’s really had an effect,” one screenwriter with a yuletide drama currently in development hell tells me, speaking on the condition of anonymity. “Christmas movies are meant to be a bit earnest and sincere. That’s sort of baked into their DNA. And right now, the whole culture of mainstream cinema is out of step with that. It’s making it hard for anything to move [out of development and into production] that’s not covering Christmas in some winking, ironic way.”

“The snark is a problem,” agrees Dowse. “A good Christmas movie can be funny, but it does have to have a purity of heart for it to resonate in a traditional way. I get sent a lot of Christmas movie scripts and they’re subverting it with an action idea, or a horror idea.” It’s why Christmas movies that have received theatrical releases in recent years include John Woo’s gimmicky, dialogue-free action film Silent Night, or the David Harbour vehicle Violent Night, in which the Stranger Things star played a Santa Claus verging on John Wick.

Another issue might be the Christmas movie release window. In the last decade, at least since 2015’s Star Wars: The Force Awakens, December has increasingly been a space in the calendar for sequels in major franchises, among them Avatar: The Way of Water, Spider-Man: No Way Home and The Matrix Resurrections. “Christmas is a huge movie-going time, and it’s where studios want to leave lots of room for their tentpoles,” says Sneider. “This year, it’s [Lion King sequel] Mufasa. Looking at the December calendars going forward, it’s Star Wars and Avatar.”

Today’s franchise-driven Hollywood doesn’t want to put anything in the path of those juggernauts – especially when Christmas movies themselves rarely lend themselves to franchises. How many festive sequels can you name beyond Home Alone, Gremlins, Die Hard or Bad Santa?

It doesn’t help, either, that studios used to take bigger chances on ideas during the heyday of the Christmas movie. Home Alone, for instance, drew audiences on the strength of its premise of a little boy fending off burglars single-handed during the Christmas break – relative unknown Macaulay Culkin certainly wasn’t the draw. The likes of Will Ferrell and Bruce Willis were similarly untested movie stars when they starred in Elf and Die Hard, respectively. But that wouldn’t fly today.

open image in gallery

“There’s an impression [now] among Hollywood executives that, in a time where you’re competing with TikTok and YouTube for people’s attention, there’s almost no point releasing a movie without a major star,” a source familiar with the production of Red One tells me. “Which leads to these insanely inflated budgets, because you’re paying out so much for actors.” (The Rock was reportedly paid $50m to appear in Red One – one-fifth of the entire cost of making the film.)

Dowse believes it’d be a shame if Christmas blockbusters were to disappear. At their best, he says, they play an important social role. “Families watch them together,” he says. “It’s a huge part of life, and I think, especially, American life, starting at Thanksgiving – people hunkering down to watch films as a family. I don’t think there’s a lack of appetite. I think there’ll always be a market for them. I just think it’s about threading the needle, and finding a story that’s unique enough and gives you a certain feeling.”

“I think it’ll take [studios] revising their idea of what a Christmas movie is,” agrees Sneider. “It doesn’t need to be a $250m world-building thing with giant polar bears and explosions. At the end of the day, we just want some heart.”