How Netflix Christmas movies took over the festive genre
Netflix has become the dominant force in festive films, releasing several new movies every year. How did Netflix Christmas movies get so big?
At the time of writing, Netflix Christmas movies make up four of the spots in its UK top 10 for films. It's no stretch to say that the streaming service has completely dominated the market for festive films ever since it first decided to put on its red suit and fake beard to delve into the world of Christmas movies.
Netflix had already established itself as one of the biggest movie enterprises in Hollywood when, in the winter of 2017, it unveiled A Christmas Prince. Drenched in festive treacle and as cheesy as a plate of baked camembert, it told the story of a driven young American journalist who forms an unlikely romance with the dashing Prince Richard of Aldovia.
A Christmas Prince was an enormous success — it's now the first part of a trilogy — but it wasn't until the following year that Netflix really got bitten by the Christmas bug. In The Princess Switch, they cast Vanessa Hudgens in dual roles as an American baker and a foreign duchess, who just happen to look identical. Romcom hijinks ensue when they agree to switch lives.
The Princess Switch proved even more successful than A Christmas Prince and duly spawned its own trilogy, concluding in 2021. These two series established Netflix as a destination for undemanding, fun Christmas romances — similar to the type fans of the Hallmark Channel have been familiar with for decades.
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Netflix has essentially cannibalised the Hallmark model. It makes cheap, formulaic Christmas romcoms, often with punny titles, and it makes them by the dozen.
The formula is simple. Usually, there's a career-focused, misanthropic woman — she's often a journalist of some kind — with little love for the festive season. By meet-cute contrivance, she meets a salt-of-the-earth man with rugged good looks and dirt under his fingernails. Ninety minutes of screentime later, she's less focused on her job, hopelessly in love, and busy covering her home with tinsel.
Nobody would claim this is the recipe for great cinema, but we all love these movies. Hallmark makes around 20 of them a year and duly rakes in the cash, so it's no surprise that Netflix has got in on the act. The difference for Netflix is that they also fill another new gap in the festive movie industry.
In recent years, major studios have lost interest in making outright Christmas movies. And when they do, they're often tedious exercises in slop like this year's truly awful Red One — a Dwayne Johnson action vehicle dressed up with a bit of snow and some sleigh bells.
“The studios aren’t going to make Christmas comedies if there are six Christmas comedies on a streaming platform,” Sony Pictures Motion Picture Group president Sanford Panitch told The Hollywood Reporter in 2023. “So [our strategy is] partly about finding the spaces that are theatrical, and not feeling that there’s something that someone can get at home for free.”
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Put simply, the legacy Hollywood studios aren't going to waste their time making festive films when audiences expect to be able to see them while getting a head-start on their wrapping and without having to bother putting on a coat to brave the weather. It's not just Netflix either, with Disney+ (Noelle), Prime Video (Candy Cane Lane), and Apple TV+ (Spirited) all firmly in the Christmas business.
So Netflix has filled this gap. They have made handsome animations like the stunning Klaus and this year's That Christmas — from the pen of Love Actually's Richard Curtis — as well as family-friendly slices of spectacle like The Christmas Chronicles — starring Kurt Russell as a rock n roll Santa Claus.
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Netflix's deep pockets are enabling it to fill two separate niches, thereby dominating the Christmas movie industry. The streamer simply understands that it's uniquely placed to win eyeballs over the festive period. It's a period when a lot of people have more free time than usual and, stuffed with food and booze, they're more likely to spend that free time in front of the telly.
And increasingly, when people are sat in front of their TV unsure of what to watch, they look to Netflix first. By providing these audiences with exactly the sort of simplistic festive fare that they want, Netflix has won Christmas — at least for now.
