Attention: Your Favorite Christmas Movies Suck

Ho ho ho there! The holidays are upon us, and with vacation and family time comes the inevitable re-watching of Christmas favorites from our childhood and beyond. There's only one problem - most of these movies are on the bad side of mediocre, and I'm going to use data (gathered from IMDb) to prove it to you.

PS- my favorite Christmas movie is Bad Santa, if that tells you anything.

Reason #1: Too many Christmas movies are unfunny"comedies"

Looking at only the primary movie genre, and excluding rom-coms (which I'll get to later, yuck), over HALF of the top 100 or so Christmas movies are classified as 'Comedy'. I'm not laughing, though: 

                                                 

You might say - what's wrong with some good, clean, family fun? Well, you may have a point. But the numbers disagree with you. For posterity, here are the average ratings for the top movie categories:

Reason #2: Not nearly enough cursing, violence, or nudity

Almost all the top movies are rated G, PG, or PG-13, as show in the pie chart below. We need more R-rated films, and Die Hard (yes, it counts) is a great example of this: sure, it's nice when the main character reunites with their family in time for Christmas, but it's that much more memorable when they blow stuff up along the way.

Reason #3: The most popular movies aren't necessarily good ones

The following scatterplot shows the most popular Christmas movies and if their popularity (measured by IMDb's traffic) has any correlation to how good they were rated by viewers. Spoiler alert: the correlation is weaker than a snowman in May.

Sure, some popular movies are also good. But if you actually enjoyed The Santa Clause 2, you should probably keep waiting for Easter to come around, because you need Jesus.

Reason #4: They haven't made a good one in years

I'll use a simple table to illustrate this - here are the top 25 Christmas movies by rating, with their release year. Notice anything? There are exactly 4 movies made after the year 2000. The last broad-release Christmas movie to feature in the top 100 is 2015's The Night Before (yes, the one with Seth Rogen) which earned a whopping 6.4 rating, so let's all reflect on how Hollywood has continually failed us.

Reason #5: Would it kill you to have some damn culture?

Sure, America has always dominated the holiday movie industry. But Christmas is celebrated worldwide, and while we do have some Canadian (Silent Night, Black Christmas) and British films (Love Actually,  A Christmas Carol ), these are still all in English. Here are the few non-English movies I could find that register a blip on IMDb:

- The Disappearance of Haruhi Suzumiya (Japan, 2010)

- Joyeux Noel (France, 2005)

- A Christmas Tale (France, 2008)

Reason #6: The best Christmas movies aren't even released on Christmas!

Although the vast majority of Christmas movies are released during November and December, none of the top favorites were released on Christmas Day itself (see the chart).

Imagine, you've spent the entire day with family, and all you want is to see the latest & greatest Christmas film in theaters. But what kind of movies are  released on Dec 25? That honor is reserved for lame money-grabbing flicks like Marley & Me, Catch Me If You Can, and As Good As It Gets. The end result of this being that you end up seeing the same November-release Christmas movie you've seen with your 5-year-old nephew 3 times already in the past month. BORING!

Reason #7: This actually exists

We're so bad at making real-life Christmas movies that we have to resort to milking holiday cheer from an always-grumpy OGRE, his ogre wife, their ogre baby (what?) and the sound of Eddie Murphy's career dying. I rest my case.