Image: Red One, Warner Bros. Pictures
If you’ve noticed an ever-expanding selection of holiday films, you’re not imagining things - the boom in Christmas movies this century has been significant. According to Parrot Analytics Content Panorama, as of 2023 the number of Christmas movies has grown sixfold compared to the number of holiday movies that had premiered prior to 2000.
Behind the macro trend of booming Christmas content there are a few interesting insights in recent years. The peak of new Christmas movie releases came in 2020. That year saw the biggest year on year rate of growth in the number of new Christmas movies. Two things likely drove this. First, the production disruptions early in the pandemic shifted movie premieres later in the year. Second, as we noted at the time, audiences were craving comfort content amidst global challenges and sentimental holiday fare was exactly what they were looking for.
While 2020 was a high point for the amount of new Christmas movies premiering, there has been a steep decline since then. The pace of new Christmas movie premieres has fallen each year since then. In 2023 there was only a 7% growth in the number of Christmas movies. While this year’s holiday season isn’t yet done, it looks like it is on track to continue the trend of fewer Christmas movies. To get a sense of the pace of new holiday content this year compared to others, we looked at the number of movies that premiered as of December 4 each year. 2024 has been the first year that fewer than 100 holiday movies premiered as of December 4 since 2017.
Not only have there been fewer new Christmas movies premiering this year, demand for Christmas movies in the lead up to the big day is lagging prior years. Unsurprisingly, demand for Christmas movies builds during the months of November and December, peaks on December 25, and then sharply falls off as consumers move on to the New Year and beyond. 2023 saw the biggest spike in demand for Christmas movies on December 25th of the past several years. So far the growth in demand for Christmas movies this year is on par with 2019.
Even with fewer new releases there have been a couple standout Christmas movies so far this year. While the most popular Christmas movies each year tend to be dominated by classics like “It’s a Wonderful Life” or “Elf,” two new releases featured in the ten most in-demand Christmas movies as of December 15th. “Red One” and “Our Little Secret” had 60.4x and 29.9x the average movie demand respectively and show how new movies can still break through the powerful Christmas nostalgia that keeps the classics in demand each year.
