The Christmas rom-com is broken – please fix it

Christmas used to be my favourite time of year for one reason – and it wasn’t the presents, or the food, or the time with family or whatever (although those things, of course, have their nice moments). No, it was because of the movies. Specifically, the holiday romances.

The months between October and December each year have increasingly become a veritable smorgasbord of romance movies, dressed up in their red-and-green holiday finest. I trace the first ripples of this glittering tidal wave back to the release of A Christmas Prince on Netflix in 2017 – a movie so terrible it was incredible. It became so popular that it spurred not just streaming services but also legacy holiday romance homes like Hallmark and Lifetime to up the ante and produce more and more (and more) in the genre every year.

Alicia Silverstone as Kate and Oliver Hudson as Everett in Netflix’s A Merry Little Ex-Mas.Credit: Marni Grossman/Netflix

At first, discovering this world felt like boarding the Polar Express, only instead of the North Pole on the other side, it was a small snow-covered town in North America where everyone liked each other and wore cozy knits and exclusively drank hot chocolate and desperately needed to save the local Christmas tree shop’s annual candy cane-flavoured pie baking festival.

It felt about as far from the sweaty, sand-in-your-swimmers, flies-in-the-pav, bin-cricket-in-the-backyard Aussie Christmas as you could get. A world where problems were small and could easily be solved in 90 minutes with the right dash of cinnamon, a touch of tinsel, and a hot guy in flannel telling the evil real estate tycoon to get the hell out of town and take his plans to turn the ice skating rink into a high-rise condo with him. The perfect form of escapism.

But, like any good holiday lunch, there comes a point when you’re not just stuffed, you’re overstuffed – the very thought of a fourth kind of trifle makes you physically ill, and you just need to lie down and take a nap. And unfortunately, the holiday romance genre has reached that point. There are simply too many of these movies, and rather than filling the audience’s insatiable appetite, they’re giving everyone a food coma before the feast has even started.

Where once it was a fun challenge to sift through the releases searching for your fave actors and tropes to craft a “to watch” list you could methodically make your way through before December 25, it’s now too overwhelming to keep track of them, let alone all of them. And it’s not just that the quantity is too much – it’s that the quality hasn’t grown proportionally along with it.

I’m not going to pretend this is a genre that makes for fine art, but it does generally lead to high camp and a lot of fun. Or at least, it should. It feels like it’s been years since a truly great Christmas rom-com was released, and even the ones that should be so-bad-they’re-good are just, like, fine. Which is basically the worst thing one of these movies can be.

The whole enterprise feels more hollow than the presents underneath the mall Santa’s Christmas tree. The tropes have been reheated so many times they’ve gone completely dry, and there’s not a single spark of chemistry to be found in any of the leading couples. It’s a total waste of the time and talent of former ’90s and ’00s teen stars.

There’s also the fact that the escapism these movies offer doesn’t hit quite like it used to. In the age of TikTok tradwives and a second Trump term, the overwhelmingly white, straight, conservative, and very, very American world of holiday romance feels less like a quaint fantasy and more like a bleak threat.

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These cheap, churned-out Christmas movies have got to go. We need to bring back real holiday rom-coms, where a Sandra Bullock-type lies to the family of her crush-who’s-in-a-coma and then falls in love with his brother. Or where someone like Cameron Diaz swaps her home with someone like Kate Winslet and falls in love with a charming single dad who wears napkins on his head to make his kids laugh. Or hell, even where Emilia Clarke falls for a ghost played by Henry Golding, except in a movie with actual Christmas magic that somehow allows them to live happily ever after.

In short, we need real chemistry, charming leads, and something that at least resembles a plot. We need a Heated Rivalry, but make it Christmas. Here’s hoping one of the 793 holiday romances that will inevitably be released next year actually delivers such gifts – because this year it’s pretty much all lumps of coal.

Disagree? Tell us what new Christmas movies you’ve enjoyed this year in the comments.

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