How Christmas Movies Have Changed Over The Last 20 Years
Joseph Holmes
7 min read ⭑
“The Best Christmas Pageant Ever” has made headlines over the past month by opening and holding onto both box office and critical acclaim. Not only was it well reviewed by critics (including myself), but by audiences as well.
The film also currently holds a 91% critics score and a 97% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes. This is unheard of for a faith-based property.
With this cross-section of acclaim, could a faith-based film really become a mainstream staple of the holiday for families?
Why, yes. In fact, because of changes in the film industry, and the changing demographics of family life in America, we’re likely to see a great deal of Christmas movies in the future that are focused on faith. You might say the future of Christmas films is very much faith-based.
Universal Pictures
The Fall of Christmas and Rise of Faith Movies
One of the most fascinating things is the collapse of the Christmas movie and the rise of the modern faith-based genre happened around the same time approximately 20 years ago.
I’ve written before about the history of Christmas films. They started as a genre when Christmas was primarily celebrated by Christian families, but also by secular ones. And since the country was secularizing in general, Hollywood made the movies primarily secular to get the widest audience possible.
Since Christmas was traditionally a religious holiday centered on the birth of Jesus, that’s why Santa Claus showed up so much as a representative of God and faith, such as in films like “Miracle on 34th Street.” Since it was a holiday for families, that’s why the movies were made for families, like “Home Alone,” “Elf” and “Muppet Christmas Carol.”
But that changed after 2003 — a year considered by many to be the last one where we had largely agreed upon Christmas classics. That’s the year that we had “Elf” and “Love Actually” (both in theaters at the same time). After that, the movie industry changed, and so did the Christmas holiday. People were spending less holidays with their families, and they were watching less movies together, too.
As a result, Christmas movies stopped being made for the whole family and started going after smaller market segments. Hallmark Christmas movies for the Christian moms; action movies like “Violent Night” for the guys and “The Grinch” for the kids. As Esther Zuckerman wrote in The New York Times:
“Streaming was ostensibly supposed to make movies more accessible, but instead it just makes them feel more disposable. And that’s not to say the streamers haven’t released some genuinely engaging Christmas material among the heaps of dreck, like the visually inventive Netflix animated feature “Klaus” (2019) or Hulu’s queer rom-com, “Happiest Season” (2020), starring Kristen Stewart. Still, the holidays thrive on nostalgia, and it’s hard to be nostalgic for the latest Vanessa Hudgens princess movie you watched while simultaneously scrolling through your Instagram feed.”
At the same time, the very next year, Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ” launched the faith-based film renaissance. This began a massive growth of the faith-based film industry, with movies like “Facing the Giants,” and “God’s Not Dead” rising to the top in the genre. It reached new heights when “I Can Only Imagine” became the highest-grossing independent film of 2018.
This led to Lionsgate partnering with the Erwin Brothers for their future projects and the explosion of Angel Studios and Dallas Jenkins’s “The Chosen”. Now, faith-based films are a reliable subgenre that Hollywood studios like Netflix (with movies like this year’s “Mary”) and Amazon (with movies like “On a Wing and a Prayer” and upcoming projects such as the Biblical drama “The House of David”) are happy to bankroll to please Christian audiences. It’s therefore fitting that, on the 20th anniversary of the faith-based renaissance, these two genres could finally meet and likely to the benefit of both.
Putting Christ Back in Christmas
So why will we likely see Christmas movies become a lot more faith-based in the coming years?
For starters, faith-based films and Christmas movies are a natural fit. Most obviously, Christmas — while not exclusively a Christian holiday (68% of Americans identify as Christians, but 83% celebrate Christmas) — is still a Christian holiday. When you are making a Christmas movie and a faith-based one, you are targeting highly overlapping audiences.
Furthermore, even Americans who are not Christians understand it’s a Christian holiday, and are accepting of its religious roots and expression. Hence, why they will accept Saint Peter mentoring an angel to visit George Bailey in “It’s a Wonderful Life” and how prevalent the local Methodist church is in “Home Alone.”
Even deeper than that, the values, themes and stories of both Christmas movies and faith-based movies are almost identical. They both are about family. They both are about reconciliation. They both are expected to be sentimental and heartwarming. They both are about faith — at the very least in some higher power like Santa Claus — if not Jesus.
“The Shack” and “It’s a Wonderful Life” are both about depressed husbands/fathers being visited by God (or agents of God). “Die Hard” and “Fireproof” are about divorced couples reconciling. “I Can Only Imagine” and “Elf” are both about estranged fathers and sons reconciling. “A Christmas Carol” (previously a book) and “God’s Not Dead” are about angry atheists in the form of a Christmas movie.
With so much overlap, it almost begs the question, why hasn’t there been a successful faith-based movie before now in the era of the faith-based renaissance? It’s hard to say. There have been attempts. “The Nativity,” “The Star” and “Journey to Bethlehem” were attempts to do an adaptation of Jesus’s birth that didn’t quite connect. Most likely, it’s just that faith-based movies have still been relatively small as a genre for the past 20 years. Therefore, it makes sense that it would take a while for a “subgenre of a subgenre” to break out.
Second, faith-based films fit well in a split-audience world that Christmas films struggle with.
“Faith-based Christmas movies are a version of the Christmas movie that is primed to thrive in the very culture that secular holiday movies have declined in.”
Christmas films fell out of favor exactly when faith-based films started taking off. A big part of that was because Christmas movies were based on getting the widest audience possible. But people stopped watching movies as a family (those that weren’t blockbusters), so they suffered in a world where the market became segmented as digital streaming became the norm.
As New York Times film critic Alissa Wilkinson put it in an article for Vox: “As pop culture continues to splinter into niches and micro audiences (thanks in part to technological advances), it frequently caters to our individual and identity-group preferences, siloing art rather than creating art that might be watched by a range of audience members.”
But faith-based films thrived in that world because they haven’t tried to cater to everyone (and could be explicit about their Christianity) and have had really low budgets (so they didn’t need to please everyone and make lots of money at the box office to make a profit).
Amazon’s Dwayne Johnson Christmas action movie “Red One” technically made more money than “The Best Christmas Pageant Ever”. But it wasn’t as profitable at the box office because the movie’s budget was so much bigger. Faith-based Christmas movies are a version of the Christmas movie that is primed to thrive in the very culture that secular holiday movies have declined in.
Hollywood already has given up on the “universal” Christmas film in favor of finding success in the “Christmas subgenre” space. But most of the subgenres they are investing in are expensive to make and market (like action movies or animation for kids). This is a space that faith-based movies thrive in as an apex predator with its low budgets and high return, much like horror movies. Like horror movies, Hollywood will follow that return on investment to increasingly shift resources to making more of those movies.
Thirdly, the demographics of families run in favor of faith-based Christmas movies. One of the most important demographic realities that will shape our future in the coming decades is the fact that religious people are increasingly the only people having children.
Both religious people and non-religious ones are having fewer children, but secular people are having far, far less than religious people are (in many cases, having none at all).
According to the Institute for Family Studies:
[V]irtually 100% of the decline in fertility in the United States from 2012 to 2019 can be explained through a combination of a growing number of religious women converting to irreligion, and declining birth rates among the nonreligious. … [I]t’s worth reflecting on what a large cultural difference this represents. The most religious Americans in 2019 had similar fertility rates as women in India, Libya, Sri Lanka, Tunisia, Iran, Myanmar, Saudi Arabia, Peru or Mexico. The least religious Americans in 2019 had similar fertility rates as women in Hong Kong, Japan, Portugal, Greece, Italy, Singapore or Moldova.
This means that in the future, families and religious families are going to be overwhelmingly just two ways of saying the same thing. This means that movies appealing to families will increasingly just be a synonym for appealing to religious families. And because Christmas is overwhelmingly a holiday centered on families, there will be every incentive to make these movies overtly religious (and certainly no incentive not to). People reward movies that reflect their lives and the more religious movies will more directly reflect the lives of the families watching them, while also alienating sparingly few.
Of course, there will be Christmas movies that appeal to non-families, like “Violent Night.” But they will increasingly be forgotten or niche because there will be no nostalgia attached to them.
What Christmas movies do you consider classics? Typically they’re ones you watch as a child, right? Now think about “The Best Christmas Pageant Ever.” How many people are going to watch that as a kid? Maybe a lot of people — especially kids in Christian households. Even if these kids fall away from faith as adults, they will still remember such a film fondly much in the same way atheists enjoy “It’s a Wonderful Life” today.
There’s also reason to believe we’ll see less falling away from faith in the future. Religious families have always tended to have more children. But the reason that religion has declined has been in large part because non-religious institutions like Hollywood having a stronger influence over religious people’s children than they did. In a world with a growing faith-based film industry, that monopoly on influence is slowly shrinking.
The holiday season (including Advent) and Christmas movies have always been inevitably tied to family. If the future of families are faith-based, it stands to reason that the future of Christmas movies will also be. Of course, since the future of the American family is also the future of everything, a lot more things are going to be faith-based, too.
Joseph Holmes is an award-nominated filmmaker and culture critic living in New York City. He is co-host of the podcast The Overthinkers and its companion website theoverthinkersjournal.com, where he discusses art, culture and faith with his fellow overthinkers.
