How Christmas Movies Grow
Why have we anointed a handful of Christmas movies as Christmas classics? I do some digging.
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Like many of you, my family loves to watch Christmas movies.
Leading up to Christmas, we tend to watch Home Alone, Home Alone 2, The Grinch (2000), The Grinch (1967), White Christmas, A Charlie Brown Christmas, The Santa Clause, and I might watch A Christmas Story on my own time (my wife hates it).
But on Christmas day? My family opens presents in the morning and then proceeds to watch 3 particular Christmas classics. It’s a Wonderful Life, Elf, and of course, the super nostalgic claymation Rankin/Bass classic, Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.
We all tend to gravitate toward the same handful of Christmas films.
You might also watch Christmas Vacation, A Christmas Carol (2009), The Polar Express, Jingle All the Way, Miracle on 34th Street, Love Actually, The Nightmare Before Christmas, Die Hard, Gremlins, and others as well.
Every year, I wonder who “anointed” this handful of Christmas movies as Christmas classics and why? How do Christmas movies grow?
This year, I decided to do some digging.
THE RESEARCH
The goal of my research was to look for patterns in Christmas classics. What common factors went into how a Christmas movie becomes a Christmas classic? Critical acclaim? Wide distribution? “Christmassyness?” Commercial success? Star power?
First, I had to identify which Christmas movies are the most popular today. Which films have stood the test of time? Next, I wanted to look for patterns that might suggest how this happened. Is there a formula for success?
RESEARCH LIMITATIONS
The only data I could find that could help me get to the bottom of this also limited me in which films I could analyze accurately and which questions I could answer. The most reliable data I found was the Lifetime Adjusted Grosses for the top 13 Christmas movies* and a few recent Holiday movie popularity surveys.
*Lifetime Adjusted Grosses are adjusted for inflation and ticket sales relative to release year. I could only find Lifetime Adjusted Grosses for the top 1,000 films. 13 of those were Christmas movies.
This gave me proxies for which Christmas movies saw the most initial theatrical success and which films are thought of first when people are asked to name their favorite Holiday movies today.
The most comprehensive survey I could find was conducted by Tubi and OnePoll in 2019, and I cross-checked Tubi/OnePoll’s top 50 films with other surveys to ensure it wasn’t missing any popular Christmas movies. It wasn’t.*
*I didn’t include Die Hard and Gremlins because neither seemed like they were intended to be Christmas films. The conversation about Die Hard and Gremlins as Christmas movies didn’t start until around 2016.
Only having data on the top theatrically successful films of all time meant that I could only compare theatrically released movies to one another in many cases. So, for example, I had to exclude TV specials when looking at commercial success. I was, however, able to look at all 50 films in Tubi/OnePoll’s survey when comparing the content of the most popular films.
With all these limitations, I wasn’t able to empirically prove much, aside from which films were box office successes, but I was able to identify several interesting patterns.
COMMERCIAL PATTERNS
To recap:
I have factual data on which Christmas movies performed the best in theaters.
I have a proxy for which Christmas movies are the most popular today. This gives me a good idea of which Christmas movies were the most watched when they were released and which films are the most watched now.
THE HIGHEST LIFETIME ADJUSTED CHRISTMAS MOVIES OF ALL TIME
Home Alone - $6.2 Million
The Grinch (2000) -$4.4 Million
Home Alone 2 - $3.8 Million
The Santa Clause - $3.2 Million
The Grinch (2018) - $2.7 Million
The Polar Express - $2.7 Million
Elf - $2.6 Million
The Santa Clause 2 - $2.2 Million
A Christmas Carol (2009) - $1.7 Million
Christmas Vacation - $1.6 Million
Four Christmases - $1.5 Million
The Nightmare Before Christmas - $1.5 Million
Scrooged (Bill Murray) - $1.3 Million
With this information, I can answer the following question:
DO CHRISTMAS MOVIES RELY ON INITIAL THEATRICAL PERFORMANCE TO BECOME CLASSICS?
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