Hollywood Loves Its Never-Ending Blizzard of Cheap Christmas Movies

On the evening of November 16th, a corner of the Warner Bros. studio lot was decorated with string lights and tinsel. Children were asked by Santa if they were naughty or nice while the stars of three movies were on the red carpet.

It is not the kind of film that Warner Bros. Discovery is known for. The holiday films were made on a budget of $3 million to $5 million for the streaming service. They are part of an increasingly important genre for Hollywood as it navigates the Age of the Binge.

A growing thirst for holiday movies is corralling media giants into making hundreds of hours of Santa-ske A California Christmas was the most watched movie on the internet for more than two weeks after it was released. In its first month, it watched 59 million hours.

The phone rang immediately. The founder of the film production company said Christmas! He says, "Warner Bros. was like, 'Wait a minute, your offices are on our lot, you're doing these for us.'"

There will be about 150 Christmas movies on television and streaming platforms this year. The linchpin of the category has 40, while the other has 26. Fox Nation has five. The Santa Clauses was one of the top streamed shows in the US during the week before Thanksgiving. The R-rated Violent Night, in which a hard-drinking Santa rescues a family from mercenaries, outperformed box-office projections with a haul of $13.50 million in its opening weekend in December.

David Zaslav, Warner Bros. Discovery's chief executive officer, favors big-budget releases in theaters that can generate billions of dollars in revenue, even though he can't understand the economics of straight-to-streaming films. Cheap holiday movies, and a large quantity of them, are an exception in that they can be made in as little as three weeks and require minimal marketing costs. Goofy Christmas Films, Christmas Films from the 1990s, British Christmas Films, Canadian Christmas Films and more are included in the subcategory of Christmas-themed films on the service.

viewers have embraced the genre The Noel Diary was the number one production in the week ended December 4. The movie is in the top 10 in 83 countries, including a number of Muslim nations and Israel. More than 200 new feature films and TV movies with the word Christmas were listed on the Internet Movie Database last year, doubling since 2016 and quadrupling since 2011.

For most productions, the recipe for success involves assembling an inexpensive and often little-known cast and being frugal with expenses that usually soak up movie budgets. The sets for multiple Christmas films are recycled by the studios. A California Christmas was filmed on a soundstage built at his ranch in Sonoma County.

Most of the time the stories of strangers falling in love in less than two hours are universal. Hanukkah on Rye is a holiday love story about a customer falling for a Jew.

Hollywood can make hundreds of films at rounding-error prices with their return on investment based on how long viewers watch them on streaming platforms. That is different from the largesse associated with the theatrical distribution model. Top Gun sequel netted star Tom Cruise a paycheck of around $100 million based on its box-office performance, while director James Cameron has said his Avatar sequel, opening in theaters on Dec. 16, has to sell roughly $2 billion worth of tickets just to breakeven.

Some actors are linked to the genre because of their roles in holiday themed productions. It has become a sure thing that it is also attracting the likes of drama stalwarts such as The Happiest Season, which was one of the biggest film releases of all time. Falling for Christmas was the second most watched film of the month, and it was written and directed by Lindsay Lindsay, who hadn't starred in a major Hollywood production in about a decade.

Afshar is going to branch out into other holidays in the future. We should assume that we keep the ball rolling. He says they want to do 15 movies next year and half of them will be holiday themed. Seven or eight will be Christmas and one will be Thanksgiving.