Hollywood leans toward edgier Christmas movies in search of new classics
The test of a truly great Christmas movie is not in its opening weekend; it’s in the years that follow.
It’s with that understanding that Love the Coopers writer Steven Rogers will evaluate how his ensemble family flick does, noting it’s the film’s afterlife that will really determine whether he has a hit on his hands.
“Absolutely (making an enduring favourite is) what you aspire to,” says Rogers in a recent interview from Los Angeles.
The canon of beloved holiday fare is deep and diverse, with well-worn family faves including Miracle on 34th Street, Home Alone and A Christmas Story, and newer entries such as Elf and Frozen. Meanwhile, more tangential Christmasset flicks like Die Hard have staked their claim to audiences looking to escape overly cloying fare.
But that hasn’t stopped Hollywood from trying to create a new holiday classic year after year, and there’s a bevy of contenders this season including the Seth Rogen comedy The Night Before and the horror flick Krampus.
But Scrooged scribe Mitch Glazer says it’s not easy to craft a holiday tale, noting it can easily veer into saccharine territory if you’re not careful.
“You don’t want to be cynical and sentimental — meaning manipulative in a crass way — but you are dealing with the Christmas season,” says Glazer, who scored a holiday classic with his 1988 ad- aptation of the Charles Dickens novel A Christmas Carol, starring Bill Murray as a pompous TV boss.
If there’s a checklist for holiday fare, it would include “snow and family, and a little bit of magic,” says Rogers. But film programmer Jesse Wente points to a marked tonal change that distinguishes modern-day favourites from days of yore.
“Whether it was Scrooge or Miracle on 34th Street or Holiday Inn or any of the ones that I loved, they are pretty Pollyanna,” says Wente, a programmer at Toronto’s TIFF Bell Lightbox theatre where more offbeat offerings this year include Black Christmas and Gremlins.
“They’re pretty hopeful, and the good always wins out and they’re very respectful of the holidays, which I think is pretty reflective of the time. When those movies were made, Christmas probably had an even tighter relationship to Christianity and those sort of religious connotations.”
Flash forward to Love the Coopers, which includes an atheist character, and The Night Before, which features Rogen as a drugged-out father-to-be tearing through New York with a giant star of David emblazoned on his sweater.
When pitching Love the Coopers, Rogers says he found some studios feared a Christmas movie narrowed the audience too much.
“A lot of countries don’t celebrate Christmas so that cuts them out, supposedly. But I think (the film is) about family, so I didn’t necessarily agree with that,” he says.