No, Virginia, there isn't a Santa Claus movie

Christmas has always posed something of a challenge to Hollywood—that is, how to take advantage of a season where, despite the universal triumph of blood-for-bucks corporatism in every other sphere of human existence, visions of sugar-plums still dance in people’s heads, and peace on earth and goodwill seem to be the mass illusions of choice. How can you squeeze money out of as wimp-assed an audience as this?

One would think it might be with a steady seasonal supply of wimp-assed movies on Christmas themes, like It’s a Wonderful Life, or A Christmas Carol or Miracle on 34th St. But if you take a look at what has actually played in movie theatres over the last 50 years, it comes as a bit of a shock that those three—along with a few later titles like 1983’s A Christmas Story and 1994’s The Santa Clause—are just about it; the number of theatrical features having Christmas as their genuine raison d’être  can be counted on the fingers of not much more than a couple of hands.

So, why is a movie theatre at Christmas so rarely a Christmassy place? One reason is probably cynicism brought on by the debasing of the coinage: To a big movie studio, anything released after American Thanksgiving that’s not hard-core porn or has the word ‘Alien’ in the title now seems to count as a Christmas movie. A Disney representative with whom I broached the subject began by saying “well, last year we released 101 Dalmatians....”

 I’m sorry, but 101 Dalmatians is not a Christmas movie. Neither is Die Hard 2, even if it is set at Christmas. Father of the Bride, Junior, Richie Rich and Little Women, all recent Christmas releases, aren’t Christmas movies. A Christmas movie is about Yuletide: It is a film in which either Santa Claus or angels appear, and Bruce Willis doesn’t.

What Hollywood counts as a Christmas theme has become overly-comprehensive probably because Christmas as a stand-alone movie subject is simply a tough sell—for one thing, people who are into Christmas tend to be huddled around the fireplace, not the box-office of the local octoplex. And the most seasonal, creative will in the world is also no insurance against a film generating indifferent business: The best Christmas movie ever made was One Magic Christmas—a film I have seen reduce planeloads of viewers to tears—and on its release in 1985 it flopped. Sometimes it’s better to simply do whatever you do best and call it Christmassy. Father Christmas gives way to Christmas fodder.

For a while not so long ago, Fodder Christmas was actually pretty good to us, as Hollywood used December as launch-time for a great swack of any given year’s prestige films. Audiences softened up by the season would generate revenue and build Oscar credibility for movies that would have perished in the heat of a summer release. For a time, Christmas became a celebration of the season’s other miracle: Hollywood made money by giving us good movies.

It doesn’t look much like that any more. In a typical Christmas release ten years ago, Hollywood gave us three of that year’s five Oscar nominees—Rain Man, Working Girl, and The Accidental Tourist. The last three nativities have seen only one—last year’s Jerry McGuire. Six of the eight Oscar winners immediately before 1990 were December launches. Since then, there has been only one—Schindler’s List in 1993. What happened?

What happened in 1990 was Home Alone—a lump of coal in our collective cinematic stocking that grossed half-a-billion dollars worldwide, spawned two sequels, and made its author, John Hughes, the most powerful and influential writer/producer in the world. Home Alone set the template for the next generation of holiday movies and stripped the last vestiges of sentiment from the Christmas movie season. It showed that the secret to making money at Christmas is the same as for the rest of the year, that is, with blockbusters designed to make $100 million in three weeks, supported by 2500-screen openings and carpet-bomb advertising.

Accordingly, the big nativity-season hits from the last three years have been films like Jumanji, Dumb and Dumber, Grumpier Old Men, Mrs. Doubtfire, Scream and Michael. These are movies that don’t simply take advantage of our seasonal good will the way Driving Miss Daisy or Out of Africa did; instead they bulldoze it completely, make their money and then vanish, leaving nothing behind. (Can anybody remember anything at all about Michael? Neither can I.)

 Still, Home Alone’s  most profound influence was in the video market, where it made as much money the next Christmas as it had on its initial U.S. release. (Two years later, retail sales of the Home Alone 2: Lost in New York video did even better, considerably outgrossing the theatrical release.) If Home Alone perfected the recipe for the theatrical Christmas money-maker, Home Alone on video showed us its future—which is out of the theatre and under the Christmas tree. (The ghosts who visited Scrooge were never this cruel: They showed him Christmas yet-to-come only once; he didn’t have to watch it on video the next year with Tiny Tim .)

For the Christmas feature, a movie theatre is rapidly becoming not much more than way-station on its journey to video. (One gets the impression that next week’s theatrical release of Home Alone 3 is designed mostly to give it credibility for a video release next Christmas) If it sees a theatre at all, that is—this year’s only big-studio Christmas subject is being released direct-to-video: Disney’s Beauty and the Beast: The Enchanted Christmas. The real battle of the Christmas movies this year is going to be a fight for your VCR between Beauty and last year’s big theatrical release, Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Jingle All The Way—a story, ironically, about a guy trying to buy his son a Christmas gift.

In a more reflexive movie, Arnold would probably have bought him the Beauty and the Beast video, since in the final analysis, TV is probably where all this stuff belongs. TV has always been a more Christmas-friendly medium than the movies—in fact, it’s likely the place we all got the notion that there was some kind of golden age of Christmas movies in the first place. There is some poetic justice to the process coming full-circle: Television—or more precisely, television’s constant need to fill empty broadcasting space with product—has given us our vision of Hollywood’s Christmas past. Now TV (or at least that part of it hooked up to a VCR) is poised to deliver Hollywood’s Christmas yet to come as well.

Meanwhile, back at the multiplex, things are in a state of flux and December 1997 is shaping up to be a holiday movie season explainable only in terms of chaos theory: In a month that promises to be as productive and exciting as a multi-vehicle freeway collision, American distributors are releasing close to 30 movies in 30 days—Disney is opening four movies on Christmas Day alone. Hidden away somewhere among them, there’s even an actual Christmas movie, a little independent film from France called Will it Snow for Christmas?

Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to have been given a Canadian release. Perhaps it’ll be on video in time for next Christmas.

—Published in the Globe and Mail, 1997