This Year’s 10 Most Popular TV Christmas Movies (Yes, Lindsay Lohan Is On The List)

There’s been a lot of buzz surrounding the release of several new high-profile streaming Christmas movies this year, including Lindsay Lohan’s new NetflixNFLX
movie, Falling for Christmas, and the musical romp Spirited on AppleTV+, starring Ryan Reynolds and Will Ferrell.

But it turns out that audiences are still more excited about Ferrell’s old Christmas movie, as well as some other holiday classics, than they are about the new fare.

A study from Samba TV, a TV tech company that offers analytics, found that the most popular Christmas movies this season are largely older ones. In fact, Netflix had the only two new movies to make the top 10 so far this holiday season, based on data measured from November 8 to December 11—and yes, Lohan’s Falling was one of the two. The other is The Noel Diary, based on a popular novel by Richard Paul Evans.

All the rest of the movies on the list are at least a few years old. The Chevy Chase comedy National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation claimed the top spot, viewed by 8.6 million U.S. households. Another movie released more than three decades ago, Home Alone, ranked No. 2 with 8.4 million households watching.

Ferrell’s Elf took the third spot with 7.9 million households. Rounding out the top five were two other perennial holiday favorites, Four Christmases and A Christmas Story (the original, not this year’s sequel on HBO Max, A Christmas Story Christmas, which ranked 16^th).

The newbies in the top 10, Falling and Diary, both drew more than2.5 million households to rank sixth and seventh, though pretty distant from the top contenders.

So why all the love for holiday classics? It may be a matter of accessibility, says Samba TV Co-Founder and CEO Ashwin Navin. “Gone are the days where the only way to watch a handful of holiday movies was tuning into the broadcast networks,” Navin notes. “Now we have hundreds of holiday-themed movies and specials at our fingertips via streamers like Netflix and Disney+, which are re-airing many of the old classics we love, while also featuring entirely new made-for-streaming releases.”

Big Gains Over Last Year’s Viewership

And that may be driving overall viewership increases, too. Samba found that 11 of the top 15 movies had more viewership than at the same time last year. Elf (which is available with a subscription to HBO Max) was up a whopping 224%, in fact. That could be due to some synergy with Ferrell’s new movie, a twist on the Charles Dickens classic A Christmas Carol.

Spirited ranked 13^th overall, according to Samba TV, right behind It’s a Wonderful Life. The soundtrack for the film has sold well.

Is Die Hard a Christmas Move?

Yes, according to Samba TV, and a pretty popular one. It ranked No. 8, ahead of Scrooged and Life.

Comedies for the Win

It seems viewers this time of year are more in the mood for laughs—which may reflect the current state of the world as we deal with an ongoing pandemic. Most of the top Christmas movies were comedies, though three romances did make the top 10—the two Netflix films and the 2006 rom-com The Holiday (No. 10).