The dollars and cents of sexy Netflix Christmas movies
Hot Frosty, Our Little Secret and The Merry Gentlemen show streamer's move into holiday space
For the second week of December, the running theme of Netflix's global top ten performing movies may not seem all that surprising.
There's That Christmas, the Pixar-adjacent holiday flick about Santa caught in a snowstorm. There's A Royal Date for Christmas, which pretty much speaks for itself. And there's 'Twas the Text Before Christmas, about a text that — surprise, surprise — shakes up the Christmas of a couple of attractive people.
In fact, over half of the list is in some way about the season. But it's the one right at the top that shows where the streamers are heading: Lindsay Lohan's Our Little Secret — because it was one of several Christmas titles made this year by Netflix itself. The Christmas rom-com follows all the beats of what was traditionally done by cable TV networks, but is increasingly seen as fertile ground for streamers.
For years, brands like Hallmark and Lifetime have cornered the market on simple Christmas fare — churning out hundreds of movies since the first one Hallmark helped produce, 1951's original Christmas opera Amahl & The Night Visitors. These movies rarely adjust their format: aiming for the same hokey plot elements of family, togetherness and Christmas magic. It's a standard so formulaic that last year the New York Times was able to boil them down to just a few tweaked elements, shared among virtually all their films.
But as derided as they are, the formula works. Hallmark has spent the last decade as the most-watched entertainment network on cable for adult women during the holiday season, according to Nielsen. And according to Vulture, Hallmark's "Countdown to Christmas" programming is one of the last examples of linear TV actually improving its ratings year-over-year — making Hallmark "TV's last great basic-cable channel."
It's what market researcher Parrot Analytics Brandon Katz calls "laundry folding programming," and that's no insult. It's an unchallenging but comforting type of media that survives basically any level of criticism and pays off for networks — especially around the holidays.
"It doesn't matter that the audience has seen some version of that story 1,000 times. They're going to keep watching it, keep enjoying it and we — love it or hate it — are going to keep talking about it."
According to Katz's company, that demand is only growing. So it makes sense, he says, that Netflix has borrowed some "strategic elements" from Hallmark.
"Not only are we getting a greater volume of holiday movies pretty much every holiday season, but audiences' appetite for these movies are growing," he said.
Alongside Our Little Secret, there's Hot Frosty, The Merry Gentlemen and Meet Me Next Christmas as this year's Netflix forays into the space that, Katz says, now generates "between eight and nine figures" for streaming services each winter.
But as Netflix works to capitalize on Christmas, it's not necessarily just following Hallmark's lead. Courting a younger demographic with different viewing habits and tastes, the results are generally not what you'd call your grandma's Christmas movie.
For example: The Merry Gentlemen, which follows an all-male, mostly shirtless strip troupe. Meanwhile Hot Frosty transforms the tale of Frosty the Snowman to one about a shirtless, muscular handyman.
"If Hallmark started pushing that, that would have been a calamity," said entertainment journalist Ann Marie Collymore, because its brand is "safe."
That means Netflix can "push a little bit further."
Katherine Singh, a Toronto-based pop-culture reporter, said the reasoning is simple. Traditional cable television has always courted a demographic that appreciates it as background entertainment.
"I think of my aunt who puts it on right on a Saturday. She's puttering around the house. She just likes it on in the background," she said. To differentiate itself, Netflix has been looking for glitzier offerings, buzzier names and, occasionally, raunchier plots.
But along with the attention and headlines, Netflix's titles also encourage a different kind of viewing — possibly more attractive to those looking through a list of titles, instead of channel surfing.
"With Netflix and these streamers, I think you'll see more intentional viewership," Singh said. "So it might be a Millennial or Gen Z who's sitting down on a Friday, Saturday night and they just want to tune in and actually be entertained."
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With files from Griffin Jaeger and Eli Glasner