I cannot say for sure that “Love Actually” ended a relationship I was in several years ago, but it definitely did not help. Things were headed that direction anyhow, but when we watched the popular holiday romcom together, I was admittedly a little too honest in my assessment of what turned out to be one of her favorite movies.
Released in 2003, “Love Actually” features a stellar cast in eight connected stories of holiday love and heartbreak. A modest hit at the time, it has become a comforting Christmas classic (despite how terribly a lot of its gender and sexual politics have aged … don’t get me started).
“Love Actually” is 20 years old this year. So are “Elf” and “Bad Santa,” enduring holiday movies that also came out in November 2003. (“Elf” and “Love Actually” were released on the same day.)
This seems extraordinary in retrospect because, two decades later, it’s hard to think of any similarly “classic” holiday-season films released since. I’ve seen plenty of Christmas movies made after 2003, but it would take some work to list even a few of them.
What makes a movie a classic is probably impossible to quantify, and the three films are dissimilar apart from being set around Christmas. A slow-growing hit upon its release, “Love Actually” continues to polarize viewers, inspire online hot takes and break up couples. (Anyone else? No?)
“Elf,” starring Will Ferrell as a man-child raised by North Pole elves, offers sincerity and optimism while coming up just shy of saccharine. An instant blockbuster, the movie is on cable constantly and launched a franchise that now includes a stage musical, an animated TV special and a videogame.
“Bad Santa,” in which Billy Bob Thornton plays an alcoholic small-time crook posing as a mall Santa, is a raunch-fest that is secretly sentimental and redemptive in conventional holiday-movie ways. A more modest box-office success, it was a proof-of-concept for the now-flourishing subgenre of R-rated holiday comedies.
The alignment of these three films might not be entirely coincidental. Movies released in late 2003 would have been some of the first projects produced after 9/11, and each could be understood as a different response to the terrorist attacks.
“Love Actually” begins and ends in an airport and even references 9/11 directly as it endorses love as a curative reaction to trauma. “Elf” is a sentimental love letter to New York City, still freshly haunted by the event. “Bad Santa” promotes transgressive laughter as catharsis, sorely needed at the time.
This could explain the initial popularity and durability of those films, but it doesn’t tell us why there hasn’t been a classic holiday movie in the two decades since. The answer to that puzzle might be a matter of simple arithmetic.
According to the Christmas Movie Database (countdownuntilchristmas.com), there were 15 Christmas movies released in 2003, with the disclaimer that not everybody agrees what constitutes a “Christmas movie.” Three of those, or 20 percent, became classics. Not bad!
But this quality-quantity ratio does not sustain. The database begins in the 1930s, when nine Christmas movies were produced. That number increases steadily by decade, which each contained a small handful of Christmas movies we’d all recognize.
Starting in the 2000s, though, the list balloons to 160 and keeps rising, while the number of memorable films does not. There were more than 500 Christmas movies in the 2010s, and a staggering quantity just in the past few years. Entertainment Weekly reports that 116 Christmas movies were scheduled for release this year alone — 42 of them on the Hallmark Channel.
For that we can thank the streaming economy. In a recent New York Times story on this curious lack of recent holiday-movie classics, Esther Zuckerman writes: “Streaming was ostensibly supposed to make movies more accessible, but instead it just makes them feel more disposable.”
So even if great holiday movies are made every year, it’s harder to find them, and the talent and effort to make a classic is probably diluted across the endless banquet of Christmas content — which thus far thankfully does not include a sequel to “Love Actually.”