Holiday Movie Guide 2025: Time Travel, Pickleball and Fa-La-La-La Franchises

As we have passed Peak TV, it’s probably fair to say we’ve passed Peak Christmas Movie. That doesn’t mean there aren’t still a lot of them, but it means they’re not exploding all over the place like they were for a while. The biggest lists come from (no surprise) Hallmark and Lifetime (and “faith-based” Great American Family), but there are a handful from other outlets, including Netflix, Prime, BET, OWN, and UPtv.

There was a time when I tried to run down all of them. I was younger then. We all were. We had more time, as the ghost of Christmas future had not … whoa, sorry, that got dark. We’re hitting the highlights this year, because we’ve all got things to do. Hopefully, one of yours is watching Christmas movies. (Because while these are technically holiday movies and we will get to that, they are overwhelmingly Christmas movies, and I would never want to be obtuse about that.)

Can Netflix follow Hot Frosty?

Of all the 2024 Christmas movies, nothing seemed to spark as much chatter as the Netflix film Hot Frosty, the story of a woman who fell in love with an ice-cold naked himbo who was constantly at risk of melting.

Based on Netflix’s offerings this year, they’re not going for anything quite so high-concept, nor do they have a title as amusing. They’re taking a more, shall we say, classic approach: Minka Kelly in Champagne Problems (streaming now), where she’s buying a family company and falls for the owner’s son; Alicia Silverstone in A Merry Little Ex-Mas (also out now), which involves her ex, you see … that kind of thing.

Fortunately, Russell Hainline, the mad genius who wrote Hot Frosty, is still on the job over at Hallmark, and he co-wrote my favorite 2025 Christmas movie so far. Merry Christmas, Ted Cooper! is about a weatherman, played by super-charming lead and co-writer Robert Buckley. Ted is famous for having very bad luck at Christmas time. He tries to reconnect with his old crush, a doctor played by Hallmark legend Kimberley Sustad, during a visit to his hometown. Every element of the story sounds familiar, but these things are truly all about the execution, and this one is sharp and funny, with terrific chemistry between the leads.

It’s all franchises now

One thing that has ramped up in the last few years is holiday movies that are in continuity, either through story continuity or branding, with other holiday movies. In other words, existing IP is not just for comic book characters.

Hallmark, having exhausted most of the personal pronouns in its Time for [blank] To Come Home for Christmas series, is now at it with a series they launched in 2022 with Three Wise Men and a Baby. They followed that with Three Wiser Men and a Boy last year, and now they’ve got Three Wisest Men (that seems ominous, but in fact there is still a child).

These films feature three of Hallmark’s big guns in the leading-man department: Andrew Walker, Paul Campbell and Tyler Hynes. They play brothers, and their mom is played by Margaret Colin, who played Tom Selleck’s kinda-love-interest in the original Three Men and a Baby, which is a cute touch. Now that these are the wisest of men, it’s hard to imagine they can get any wiser for a fourth movie next year, but never say never. Three Wizened Men is always an option someday.

There’s another NFL Hallmark movie this year, following last year’s Holiday Touchdown: A Chiefs Love Story. That story seemed meant to capitalize on the romance audience’s interest in Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce, but now they’ve moved entirely beyond Kansas City with Holiday Touchdown: A Bills Love Story. This one is set in Buffalo (obviously) and is again about family devotion to football. My guess is that once this series gets established, as long as there is Hallmark and as long as there is the NFL, these are likely to continue making money for everyone. I just want it to last long enough to see what they come up with for Philadelphia.

There’s magic in the air

As always, this year’s crop of Christmas films includes both romantic magic (as in, “their eyes met, sparkles burst inside them”) and literal magic (“one of them works for the actual Santa Claus”). Hallmark is leaning hard into the realm of the unreal this season.

Time travel is always popular, and this year offers A Newport Christmas (out now), in which a rich and adventurous young woman goes out in a boat on Christmas Eve in 1905 and finds herself in 2025 (what a bummer). A Grand Ole Opry Christmas also has time travel, in this case from the present back to 1995. (I took that personally; surely 1995 is not long ago to be the basis of a time travel story. I refuse to look at a calendar to check.) That film, which is already out, also has the distinction of bringing together several different Christmas movie tropes, including not only time travel but also a holiday at a famous location and a story that incorporates music and cameos from musicians, so (cowboy) hats off to them for the triple play.

She’s Making A List (out Dec. 6) pulls out a couple of the holiday’s big stars, Lacey Chabert and Andrew Walker (yes, the same Andrew Walker from the Three Wise Men series) for a film about a woman who works for the firm to which Santa has outsourced the management of the naughty list. She is investigating the son of a single dad. For several reasons, this strikes me as a madly unromantic premise, but I have loved watching both these actors in other things, and I am hoping for the best. But the phrase “Santa is outsourcing” makes me want to burn all the wreaths, I admit.

Perhaps the most durable magic Christmas tale is the making and remaking of A Christmas Carol, this year via Christmas Above The Clouds (out now). This time, a mean woman who runs a travel company ends up on a long-haul flight to Sydney where her ex is also a passenger. During the flight, ghosts of Christmas past (a flight attendant), present (the pilot) and future (an air marshal) show her … well, you know the drill. This is one of the more literal adaptations I’ve seen in a while (her name is “Ella Neezer”), and it holds up pretty well, considering the sheer number of times this has been attempted. (Shout out to Susan Lucci, who played “Ebbie” Scrooge in 1995, and to 2012’s It’s Christmas, Carol! with Carrie Fisher, and to everyone before and since.)

What if it’s not about Christmas?

Two years ago, Hallmark’s best movie of the season was Round and Round, its Hanukkah time-loop story. One of the best things about it: it was a true Hanukkah romance, not a Hanukkah-with-Christmas romance. They have yet to match it, and this year is back to a Hanukkah/Christmas combo with Oy to the World! (…sigh), about a synagogue that needs a place for services after a water line break. The church across the street offers help, and the two youth choir directors, who were competitors in high school, have to work together on a single music program. I will admit to some skepticism about the premise, but I’ll be tuning in on December 14.

Let’s talk big names

Some people are sort of “Christmas famous” and some people are closer to regular famous, and every year, some of the regular-famous people make holiday movies. Let’s take a look.

Brandy Norwood stars in Christmas Everyday on Lifetime (out now), about a fashion designer named Fancy (Norwood) who is managing a busy Christmas, including the wedding of her younger sister, who’s actually played by Norwood’s daughter, Sy’Rai Smith.

Lifetime also has the appealing duo of Vivica A. Fox and Jackée Harry in The Christmas Campaign. And for the record, as has been the case for a while, Black actors are featured far more frequently on Lifetime than on Hallmark, as well as on BET and OWN, which also have holiday slates.

Zooey Deschanel, certainly someone with Christmas chops, is in Merv on Prime Video (out Dec. 10), opposite Charlie Cox. They play a couple that breaks up and then takes their dog on a holiday trip together to help the dog feel better.

Similarly, Michelle Pfeiffer is in Oh. What. Fun., also a Prime offering out Dec. 3, directed by Michael Showalter and co-starring Felicity Jones, Chloë Grace Moretz, and — of interest to Christmas-movie enthusiasts — Dominic Sessa, the breakout kid from The Holdovers. It’s about a woman who goes all-out for Christmas every year, until one day she turns up missing. Honestly, I suspect she’s going to be okay. I don’t think it’s that kind of movie.

Over on Disney+, you can find the Jonas Brothers in, logically enough, A Very Jonas Christmas Movie, out now.

Save that [beloved thing]!

Christmas, in TV movies, is a time to save small businesses and performances. For example: on Lifetime, A Pickleball Christmas (Dec. 20) revolves around a tennis star’s effort to save his family’s racquet club, while Christmas in Alaska (Dec. 12) has a man trying to save an inn run by his sister.

Over at Hallmark, A Royal Montana Christmas has a man contemplating whether to take over his parents’ ranch. Christmas at the Catnip Cafe (out now) features two people who unwillingly end up co-owning a cat cafe. UPtv has a movie out now about saving a Christmas ranch. It’s called Saving the Christmas Ranch. The aforementioned Champagne Problems on Netflix appears to follow one of the truly classic formulas: the child of a company owner (him) versus the person sent in to represent the big-business buyer (her).

Meanwhile, Hallmark’s The Snow Must Go On features a high school musical that might have to be canceled, while Lifetime’s Deck The Hallways (with Loretta Devine!) is about a woman trying to revive her grandparents’ legendary holiday party (both out now).

Also of note

I am tickled by the fact that OWN seems to be replicating While You Were Sleeping very, very closely with Fake Yourself A Merry Little Christmas, starring KiKi Layne as a woman who pretends to be dating a guy who’s unconscious, causing her to enjoy the holiday with his family while becoming interested in somebody else entirely. It’s certainly not the first holiday movie to revisit a familiar story. This one is out on OWN and streaming on HBO Max.

Sometimes, I get the distinct feeling that a whole movie was reverse-engineered from the title, as with Hallmark’s The More The Merrier (out now). How do we create a story, someone might have wondered, that is about a proliferation of people at Christmas in a way other than the usual “family gathering” or “town gathering”? Well, perhaps you follow two OB-GYNs working the overnight shift on Christmas Eve, because that’s what this one is about. Get it? Babies! More babies! Merrier! You get it.

And finally: I don’t tend to write much about the offerings over at Great American Family, now run by ex-Hallmark boss Bill Abbott, because despite his noncommittal answers on the subject, some involved at the network seem to see it, as a counterpoint to the increased inclusivity (which is still not that inclusive!) at Hallmark. I’ve always found inclusivity positive, but if you’re interested in their take on what they call “timeless values” and you liked Hallmark better with the feel it had maybe 15 years ago, you can certainly check them out.

Copyright © 2025 NPR