Christmas movies industrial complex: Why festive slop has become the new thing

Imagine the scene: Two very attractive people are sitting in a ferris wheel compartment, the sparkling lights of Paris surround them, their bellies full of crepes, macarons and mulled wine, and they’re sharing their sadness at both losing their mothers at a young age.

Even if you don’t know the specific moment, you’re familiar with its contours, and you know exactly how that movie is going to end. You don’t even need to know that this is a scene out of Champagne Problems, currently the fourth most watched-movie on Netflix Australia.

In spots two and three are My Secret Santa and Jingle Bell Heist, both new entries into the streaming Christmas movies canon, a genre that has exploded in popularity in the past eight years, since Netflix decided to get in the game with a trio of festive films including A Christmas Prince.

In that movie, an American journalist is sent on assignment to a fictional monarchy and falls in love with a prince, a man she had previously fought with but didn’t at the time realise he had a royal title.

It’s a completely ludicrous story, as was the following year’s fairy tale The Princess Switch, an update of The Prince and the Pauper, which then somehow generated two sequels and added a third lookalike.

There’s a formula to these movies. Most of the romance-tinged ones fall along the lines of two people meet, and initially there’s a conflict or a case of mistaken identity, and by the third act, they’re clearly meant for each other.

In the case of Champagne Problems and the ferris wheel lovers — he’s the heir to a wine legacy, and she represents the American company trying to buy it, but neither realise this until after they’ve had a one-night stand and find themselves sitting at the same boardroom table, oops.

There’s often a snowy small town, a work-obsessed professional woman who needs to learn to put her phone down and smell the pine trees, and lots of cosy knit jumpers and pom-pommed beanies.

Even the stories that veer from this with its slightly more left-field ideas — a hot snowman come to life, Overboard in a ski lodge or Magic Mike but make it Christmas — end up with googly-eyed swooning.

There are also the films that remind you the most important thing is family. You can fight and be resentful, but when December 25 rolls around, kumbayas for all!

These movies almost always feature a second-tier actor such as Minka Kelly, Lacey Chabert, Alicia Silverstone, Connor Swindells, Asa Butterfield, Brooke Shields, Oliver Hudson, Vanessa Hudgens and Chad Michael Murray.

They’re familiar names and faces who were in something else you loved, usually 20 years ago, but none of them will be leading any significant cinema releases any time soon.

Or maybe it’s My Secret Santa’s Alexandra Breckenbridge, who looks kind of like Evan Rachel Wood but isn’t.

Being the faded third sheet in a carbon copy book is the point.

These movies don’t have to be good, they just have to exist. It’s almost better if they are cheesy and kind of bad. It means you can gather a group of friends, open a few bottles of wine, and have a laugh together.

They don’t need A-list actors, a cohesive storyline or believable emotional stakes because they’re all just vessels for the real star: Christmas.

Melissa Joan Hart shouldn’t be the selling point because Christmas is the brand, and nothing should overshadow those generic festive vibes.

It’s three weeks until the big day and if you’re in the mood for some red, white and gold tinsel, and you have the choice between A Very Jonas Christmas Movie or A Merry Little Ex-Mas, which do you choose?

Probably the first if you’re a Jonas brothers fan, but if you’re ambivalent about them, like most audiences, you go for the latter because it doesn’t require you to have an opinion about any family singing troupes.

These Christmas movies don’t require you to have an opinion about anything at all.

You definitely don’t need to worry about international conflicts, rising fascism in western democracies, climate catastrophe, over-consumerism or the inequitable tax system that makes property ownership out of reach for millions of Australians.

All the edges have been sanded off. It’s fairy lights and big red bows, marshmallows and hot chocolate. It’s set and forget viewing in that you could have missed most of the movie and still understand exactly what’s going on.

December is always a slog. Between preparations for what can often be a stressful family reunions, more demands on your social battery with parties and catch-ups, and end-of-year work burnout, thinking less is the attitude de jour.

Streamers have cracked on to this, but really, only because the American Hallmark Channel did years before that.

Netflix took that Hallmark formula of generally inoffensive and unimpressionable, cheap to produce and threw a little more sprinkle dust at it, though not much more.

It’s a big money maker too. Parrot Analytics valued the Christmas movie streaming market at $US132 million in 2023, up from $US90 million only two years earlier. It’ll be worth even more now.

The thing that Hallmark understood was that Christmas movies were advertiser-friendly environments with coddled audiences who are in a good mood and lured into a spirit of generosity.

That now also applies to Netflix, which in November claimed it had 190 million viewers (not accounts) on its ad-supported tiers. Amazon’s Prime Video also carries third-party advertising (you have to pay a separate extra monthly fee to avoid it), and it too has been in the game for the past few years.

Although Prime does tend to produce at least one A-list-filled Christmas movie a year (Candy Cane Lane with Eddie Murphy, for example), maybe to cut through the noise of its terrible and crowded user interface.

This year, it’s Oh. What. Fun., which is led by Michelle Pfeiffer and a supporting cast of Felicity Jones, Chloe Grace Moretz and Eva Longoria.

Pfeiffer, in the film directed by Michael Showalter, plays a Christmas-obsessed mum with three ungrateful adult children who don’t appreciate everything she does to make the holiday special for them. After yet another disappointment, she snaps and takes off, and the family are left to confront their behaviour.

It’s not a banger and the script feels incomplete but it gets a pass because it’s not trying to be more than it is, and none of these movies are trying to be a new classic that gets added to the annual rotation of favourites.

If you think about the real Christmas movie canon, the films that are rewatched annually, none of them have come out of this recent streaming surge.

The movies that people always name are still A Muppets Christmas Carol, The Holiday, The Family Stone, Love, Actually, Home Alone, Gremlins, It’s a Wonderful Life, Elf, The Santa Clause, The Nightmare Before Christmas, A Charlie Brown Christmas, The Grinch, Miracle on 34th Street, Bad Santa and, controversial to some, Die Hard.

You can debate the merits of the above list, and whether they’re actually good movies – many of them are not – but over the years, they have penetrated the culture.

Champagne Problems and Jingle Bell Heist will be forgotten by the time the tree comes down on January 4. Ditto the pair of Lindsay Lohan Christmas movies whose names have already flitted out of your mind.

Like so many movie genres, the aggressive encroachment of streaming on the cinema business has relegated Christmas movies as fleeting and inconsequential.

There are too many of them, for a start, and like almost every movie that is released first on streaming, they have no lasting impact because they’re disposable. They’re not special.

The economics of the genre have become that because audiences are now trained to expect a dozen or two new entries on streaming, they no longer go to the cinema for them. Home Alone grossed $US476 million in its original run, that’ll never happen again.

Last year, Red One, an action movie with Dwayne Johnson and Chris Evans was released into cinemas and grossed $US186 million against a budget of $US200 million. First, it was a bad movie, like, really dreadful, and second, everyone knew it would be on streaming that same holiday season.

The only Christmas movies that can still afford proper stars tend to be an action-cross-genre, such as Violent Night with David Harbour, or small passion projects such as Kate Winslet’s forthcoming tearjerker Goodbye, June, which she also directed, and is heading straight for streaming in Australia.

The only recent Christmas movie that actually deserves to be added to the canon is The Holdovers, the Oscar-winning drama-comedy from Alexander Payne and starring Paul Giamatti and Da’Vine Joy Randolph, about a boarding school teacher.

It was a deeply humanist story with a fantastic script and excellent performances. It was also a cinema release, a film made with care to have meaning beyond something to put on on the background. Something actually worth rewatching every year.

Something to remember, less is more, and then maybe movie studios will go back to making real Christmas movies worthy of becoming a classic.