Favorite Christmas movie?
Do Wisconsinites have a favorite film they like to watch around the holiday?
So, is Wisconsin Team George or Team Kevin?
A sleighful of surveys have surfaced calculating which Christmas movies are most popular in which states. Maybe it’s another sign of how divided Wisconsin is, but they don’t agree on the Badger State’s favorite.
According to Kill the Cable Bill, which calls itself a “cord-cutting resource,” it’s “It’s a Wonderful Life.” To make its pick, the site mined data from Google and Rotten Tomatoes, the movie-review aggregator.
They won’t get any argument from Comparitech, a website that evaluates search engines and other tech stuff. Comparitech also says the 1946 classic about small-town banker George Bailey (James Stewart) wishing on Christmas Eve that he’d never been born is Wisconsin’s No. 1 Christmas movie. The site did its ciphering using Google Trends and searching for the top 50 Christmas films on IMDb.com, Internet Movie Database.
(If “It’s a Wonderful Life” is favorite Christmas movie, you can see it at Marcus Theatres’ Bistroplex Southridge, Majestic, Movie Tavern Brookfield Square, North Shore, Ridge and South Shore cinemas through Dec. 24; the Avalon Theatre, through Dec. 25; and Silverspot Cinema in Brookfield through Dec. 24. It’s also showing on NBC at 7 p.m. Dec. 24.)
But National Today, a website that is very focused on unofficial holidays, touted Wednesday’s status as National Christmas Movie Marathon Day — who knew? — with a new list of favorite Christmas movies by state. No. 1 in 14 states, including Wisconsin, is “Home Alone.” In fact, the 1990 comedy with bad-boy Kevin being left behind during the holidays is, according to the site, the most popular Christmas movie overall.
And then there’s Click Cupid. The dating site came up with its own stateby-state list of favorite Christmas movies using Google Trends and Google AdWords. In that calibration, the site determined that Wisconsin’s favorite Christmas movie was “Carol,” Todd Haynes’ 2015 melodrama about a young photographer (Rooney Mara) in love with an older woman (Cate Blanchett). A bit of a head-scratcher: Although it is set around Christmastime and earned six Oscar nominations, it wasn’t a big box-office hit, and it’s never been on heavy rotation on cable or broadcast TV around the holidays.