‘I couldn’t look away!’ The rapid, runaway rise of ridiculous Christmas romcoms

I could summarise the plot of Hot Frosty – the surprise Netflix hit that has a 90% Rotten Tomatoes score – but it’s probably better put by 32-year-old Christmas film obsessive Claire Birrell. “It’s about a snowman that comes to life and it’s Ted from Schitt’s Creek and then this woman falls in love with him even though he’s only been alive for 24 hours and has the IQ of a three-year-old.” Did she enjoy it? “I couldn’t look away,” the Edinburgh-based estate agent tells me. “It was a wild ride.”

Currently cresting the Netflix Top 10, Hot Frosty is on track to become an outsized festive hit for the streamer, alongside 2022’s Falling for Christmas (Lindsay Lohan as an amnesiac heiress) and 2020’s Holidate (cynical Emma Roberts brings a fake boyfriend home for the holidays). If you’ve managed to miss Hot Frosty, it stars Lacey Chabert – a longtime Hallmark hall-of-famer – as a widow who falls in love with a snowman who has recently transmogrified into a man with a six-pack and a chin-length bob.

It follows on from other classics of the genre including Prime Video’s Your Christmas Or Mine? (loved-up students torn apart by the national rail network); Disney’s Dashing Through the Snow (rapper Ludacris as a disgruntled social worker who hates Christmas); Apple TV+’s Candy Cane Lane (Eddie Murphy as a corporate marketer who is made redundant and magic ensues); and Hallmark Plus’s A Heavenly Christmas (a dead woman falls in love with a man who is still very much alive). All of which make you wonder: are the streamers competing to make the most outlandish festive film of all time?

“It’s sort of like a Christmas hit single,” explains Empire magazine’s reviews editor John Nugent. “Everyone is trying to get something that will be replayed every year. It’s also about volume for streaming companies – like Hallmark, which are the kings of the cosy, sexy Christmas movie, they want to flood their libraries.” Is Hot Frosty the next It’s a Wonderful Life, then? “I’m not convinced it’ll endure. I also don’t quite understand the connection between the birth of Jesus Christ and hot men with abs. But I do think that the Christmas romcom industrial complex will just keep churning them out.”

There’s clearly an appetite for these films: Netflix reported that this year’s Meet Me Next Christmas, in which a woman called Layla searches out a man she met at the airport a year prior, racked up more than 18m views in the week after its release. Falling for Christmas – the success of which the streamer is likely trying to replicate with the forthcoming Our Little Secret, also starring Lohan – clocked 31m views in its first four days.

“As soon as summer’s over, I start seeking out these types of films,” says Kirsten Dent, a 40-year-old retail worker from Norwich. “When the nights get dark and cold, it’s something to feel positive about.” She is a longtime fan of Christmas films by Hallmark, the US cable channel that makes straight-to-TV films leaning heavily on traditional tropes around romance and morality, usually set in small towns with a well-preserved former child actor in a starring role.

In recent years, however, she has found herself swayed by the streamers’ bigger budget takes. “Netflix and Disney+ have got hold of these cheesy, predictable films and have added more money, better actors and a kind of tongue-in-cheek vibe,” she says. The streamers’ take on the trad Christmas romcom arguably offers all the comfort of a Hallmark classic, but with a more knowing bent. “They’re almost making fun of these Hallmark films,” says Dent, “which makes them really great fun.”

Among the more absurd plots to have graced screens in recent years are Netflix’s I Believe in Santa, in which a (grown) woman finds out five months into her relationship that her boyfriend still believes in the big man, and, of the same parish, The Princess Switch, in which a duchess (Vanessa Hudgens) switches places with a civilian from Chicago (also Vanessa Hudgens), who just happens to be her doppelganger, the week before Christmas. (They each come away with a boyfriend, naturally.)

“The most ridiculous Christmas film that I’ve seen in recent years was called The Most Colorful Time of the Year,” says Brandon Gray, co-host of Deck the Hallmark, a podcast dedicated to Hallmark. “It’s about this colour-blind guy who is given a pair of glasses by the optometrist that allow him to see Christmas in, quite literally, a whole new light. It’s weirdly wonderful.”

Dent, meanwhile, reckons The Knight Before Christmas – in which a medieval knight from Norwich is transported into present-day America, where he falls in love with a genteel science teacher played by, yes, Vanessa Hudgens – is a stone-cold classic. “These wild plotlines are kind of what makes them good,” she says. Birrell agrees: “They’re utterly ridiculous and I love them. If you’ve had a hard day at work and you cannot sit through another serial killer documentary, then the best thing to do is stick on a crap Christmas film. Hallmark has absolutely nailed it, and now Netflix is getting there, too.”

The Hallmark channel is a subsidiary of the card company and has roots in Christian broadcasting – it has been churning out chaste made-for-TV movies since 2001. But according to Alonso Duralde, a Los Angeles-based film critic and author, it wasn’t until the mid-2010s that it really upped the ante. “It was sort of like a Hallmark explosion,” he says. “By about 2020, they had really become entrenched in American culture, and with that came a lot of imitators. With Christmas film production increasing so much over the last few years, and with Hallmark movies becoming such a big part of Christmas, you’re then obviously going to start getting the parodies and the wild concepts.” Hallmark has had its own streaming service since 2007. “Streaming is taking over everything that was ever part of cable,” Duralde adds. It’s not just Americans who are watching less TV – recent data from Ofcom found that less than half of young people in the UK watch live TV, with viewers aged between 45 and 54 also in decline.

And when it comes to Christmas, where the US goes, the UK too shall follow – at least according to Thomas Ruys Smith, a professor of American literature and culture at the University of East Anglia. “Britain has long followed American trends around Christmas – whether that’s Santa arriving in Victorian Britain in the 1850s or the enduring popularity of a poem like Clement Clarke Moore’s A Visit from St Nicholas, which is now commonly known as The Night Before Christmas. I think we’ve always been interested in American trends, not least because we’ve been saturated with images of American Christmas on our screens for decades at this point.”

One of the first Christmas films, though, came from the UK: a silent production called Santa Claus, made in 1898 by George Albert Smith with a running time of one minute, 16 seconds. “We may think of Christmas films as a modern phenomenon in some ways, but they’ve been part of our Christmastimes for well over a century at this point,” says Smith. Don’t go thinking Hallmark schmaltz is a new phenomenon, either: “The way they produce dozens of films each year, iterating on a familiar theme or two, is what writers were doing throughout the 19th century in Christmas magazines and newspapers.” Dickens may not have written a hench snowman into being, but the supernatural is no new thing for Christmas stories.

But given that every Christmas tale has already been told (and told better by Dickens), where exactly are screenwriters supposed to go next? “It is a challenge,” admits Rick Garman, who has written upwards of 15 Christmas films (he’s lost count), including Hallmark’s Christmas on Cherry Lane (featuring three Christmases shown in the same house over 25 years). “So many of these companies are looking for something fresh and different, and trying to come up with something new every time is difficult – but you can find inspiration anywhere. You can look at what’s popular in the zeitgeist right now and say, ‘Well, what’s the Christmas version of that?’” Case in point: Hallmark just collaborated with the NFL to produce Holiday Touchdown, a film loosely based on Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce’s relationship. (And in which Kelce’s mother, Donna, makes a cameo.)

Garman admits he has had some grim writing gigs, such as 2019’s A Working Mom’s Nightmare (very much not a Christmas film and whose IMDb reviews include one calling it “the worst movie I have ever seen”), but all in all, he reckons it’s the best job in the world. “Who else gets to say that the work they do makes tens of millions of people happy?” he says. “They’re comfort food. In a world that’s gone mad, they’re always going to have a happy ending. There are never bad guys per se, just people who are maybe a little misguided and who will eventually see the error of their ways … and nobody’s going to die.” (Unless, of course, they’re already dead, and the protagonist is in the process of grieving them when they fall in love at Christmas.)

The magic formula to writing one? “There is no such thing as too much Christmas,” says Garman. “They should always be engaged in a Christmas activity and there should be an element of it in every single scene to create that magical holiday world.” Anything else? “The love story should be charming and romantic and there should be an element of community and family coming together.”

When it comes to romance, despite its religious roots, the Hallmark channel has done much in recent years to move with the times, says Duralde. “We’re now seeing gay and lesbian couples in lead roles and there’s more racial diversity. They’ve also made films about Hanukah and Kwanzaa.” (One Christian blog has touted Hallmark’s rival cable channel Great American Family – which Garman has also written for – as a better alternative now that Hallmark is moving towards “unbiblical relationships”.) Duralde reckons the movies are getting dirtier, too: “You still have to kind of squint to see it, but I think there’s a lot more teasing around the idea of, ‘Oh, these 30-year-olds who are falling in love with each other probably aren’t going to be satisfied with one dry kiss in the last 30 seconds.’”

Gray agrees: “With Hot Frosty, I think people liked it because it’s a little naughty,” he says. (The Boston Globe review described it as “like a porn movie if all the sex were removed and the ridiculous threadbare plot were fleshed out instead”.) “I think a lot of people who roll their eyes at the whole genre kind of see the absurdity in this one and are more willing to give it a shot,” says Gray.

Are we actually watching them, though? In the way we watched Home Alone, White Christmas, The Snowman? Smiles, tears, eyes glued to the screen? “With Hot Frosty, I couldn’t believe what I was seeing, so I watched it all,” says Birrell, “but I tend to watch these sorts of films in the background a lot of the time.” It’s reflective of the culture at large, says Nugent: “We tend to want something that doesn’t really demand much of our attention.”

As long as we keep streaming them, though, it appears the networks will keep on bankrolling them. Is it too early to predict what next year’s answer to Hot Frosty might be? “As long as two people are falling in love in the holiday season, the sky’s the limit,” says Gray. “Maybe we’ll get a story set in space.”

Five of the weirdest Christmas films to stream now

Falling for Christmas (Netflix)
Hotel scion Sierra Belmont (played by Lindsay Lohan) falls down a mountain minutes after getting engaged to her influencer boyfriend in the run-up to Christmas. She gets amnesia, but she also gets the opportunity to reinvent herself as a humble gal living rent-free in a cabin owned by a kind (and handsome) stranger.

I Believe in Santa (Netflix)
Magazine writer Lisa (Christina Moore) must reckon with every woman’s greatest fear: what happens if your adult boyfriend still believes in Father Christmas?

Holiday in the Wild (Netflix)
Kate Conrad (Kristin Davis) flies solo to Zambia after being unceremoniously dumped by her husband. There, she rediscovers her love of veterinary medicine, nurses a baby elephant back to health, and falls in love with a pilot played by Rob Lowe.

The Holiday Stocking (Prime)
A newly dead angel has 12 days to return to Earth as a stranger and save his sisters’ relationship in time for Christmas.

A Christmas Cookie Catastrophe (Hallmark via Prime)
Is what it says on the tin, really. The owner of a bakery clubs together with the CEO of a cookie company to recreate a stolen secret recipe and save Christmas.