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Actors are almost interchangeable. Oy to the World! features Canadian actor Brooke D’Orsay, who has appeared in 10 Christmas-themed movies since 2017 including Deck the Halls on Cherry Lane, Nostalgic Christmas and Christmas in Love.
You can’t describe the plots as vanilla as that would be an offence to the vanilla bean.
The plot of some Hallmark movies would cause offence to the vanilla bean.Credit: Good Weekend
There’s almost always a “career-driven” female lead (normally from an evil metropolitan centre like New York) who, for some reason, has to return to an obscure country town.
There, she’s likely to face off against a brooding hulk of a gent (with a chance he is a widower). They fight, they resolve, they fall in love. Snow falls and Christmas carols are sung.
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So formulaic are these movies, as an experiment, I used AI to see if it could come up with a Hallmark-style Christmas movie but set in an Australian context and featuring a kangaroo.
Here’s the plot to “A Dingo Ate My Christmas Spirit”: Chloe Peterson is “a highly successful, driven marketing executive from Sydney” who has a “perfectly un-Christmassy demeanour”. She’s told by her boss to take a digital detox.
So Chloe ends up renting a place in a fictional small town north of Brisbane called “Jingle Bells Bay”. The rental is double booked, so she has to share with a chap called Liam O’Connell, who is described as a “ruggedly handsome, widowed wildlife park ranger” and his daughter Daisy.
There’s a kangaroo called Rudolph (he has a medical condition that gives him a red nose) who causes all sorts of trouble around the town.
Chloe uses her big-city skills to save Liam’s wildlife sanctuary from closure. Her boss turns up on Christmas Eve to say she’s got a promotion but to get it she has to catch the plane about to leave for Sydney.
You know what happens. There’s a spare seat on the direct flight from Jingle Bells Bay to Sydney.
Die Hard … one of the great Christmas movies. But it wouldn’t fit with the AI-generated world of Hallmark.
I varied my parameters (including a Hitchcock version, a horror, an action adventure, one set in the South Pole, an Agatha Christie version, one set in space) and they all pumped out variations of my dingo movie.
That AI could generate a series of workable plots should not be a surprise. Creating 40 films with a Christmas theme every year invariably means they will look and feel the same. These aren’t destined to win an Oscar – they are the cheap stocking fillers of film.
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But they work for Hallmark and its viewers.
These movies are watched (and attract constant ratings on IMDB around 5.5 out of 10) by tens of millions.
They make Hallmark, which makes most of these shows in Canada to take advantage of tax concessions and films them on a shoestring, hundreds of millions a year.
They’re so popular that next year you can go on a Hallmark Christmas cruise from Florida to the Bahamas. Go onboard to meet some of your favourite Hallmark actors, and enjoy a “Silent Night disco” while swilling a bit of eggnog.
Hundreds of actors who would otherwise struggle to afford a gingerbread man make a living frolicking in Hallmark’s fake snow.
There’s an entire cottage industry now built on these movies which also extends to social media, where people express their views on all aspects of the Christmas film offerings.
You know you’ve reached peak pop culture importance when it crosses over into academia.
A Canadian university doctoral student, Megan Lauzier, this year produced a thesis titled More Than Meets the Eye: Unpacking the Popularity of Hallmark Movies.
Lauzier argues Hallmark’s social media strategy was a key element to the popularity of “its seemingly unremarkable movies”.
So predictable are Hallmark movies that Seth MacFarlane used his Family Guy series this year to release a parody with the title “Disney’s Hulu’s Family Guy’s Hallmark Channel’s Lifetime’s Familiar Holiday Movie”.
IMDB now lists 503 Hallmark Christmas movies, with the overwhelming majority of them created since 2008. That’s the year after Netflix started its streaming service, a year after Twitter (now X) and a couple of years before Instagram.
So formulaic are Hallmark movies that Family Guy this year released its own parody.Credit: Disney+
Pop culture has always been economically driven. But Hallmark and its Christmas movies are at an entirely new level, delivering economic opportunities in ways unimaginable a few years ago.
The interaction of technology, tax concessions, streaming services with hours to fill, advertisers looking for specialist markets, real (and artificial) social media influencers is literally playing out on our televisions/handheld devices.
That’s something to ponder this festive season. So have a Merry Christmas – with or without Die Hard.
Shane Wright is a senior economics correspondent.
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