The Christmas season is here, and nothing says Christmas quite like hot chocolate and watching the newest batch of Hallmark movies that are released throughout November! Hallmark has become a meme in today’s culture with their one-plot movies and endlessly cheesy romances, but these movies have a hold on the Christmas movie industry, so let’s look at how this festive giant has maintained its popularity.
The Negatives of Hallmark
Hallmark movies have a reputation today, mostly involving the words “cringe” and “predictable.” Even people who love Hallmark movies can’t admit that there is great variety in the scripts or plot twists, so innovation is certainly not one of their strengths. In a world where viewers continually demand improvement and more from movie studios, Hallmark has stuck with a code that has not changed in the past thirty years. And it is impossible to deny that most of their films perform pretty poorly in terms of critic reviews.
If someone writes a cheesy rom-com with on-the-nose dialogue and predictable meetups between traditional leading lovers, the most common response is “Wow, it sounds like a Hallmark movie!” Hallmark has established a reputation for very obvious dialogue that is so apparent viewers roll their eyes at the unrealism.
Hallmark has saturated the market and led to a phenomenon known as “Christmas movies that feel like Hallmark.” Netflix, Amazon Prime, and more streaming platforms have taken to producing cheesy romance Christmas movies to pull viewers to their platforms, but this means that viewers are subjected to more of the same holiday plots and tropes.
Despite all these negatives of this movie leviathan, people flock to Hallmark movies every year without fail, enough to make enough money to produce more movies the next Christmas. So why is that?
The Positives of Hallmark
There is no pretending that Hallmark movies, despite their shortcomings and predictability, are inspired movies that delight viewers every year. The movie structure is reliable, so viewers never have to guess at what the script may contain. Especially at Christmas, a time of nostalgia, many viewers seek this type of comfort movie. The idyllic scenery of European villages or little Christmas towns in every Hallmark film is also a major positive for this company, as many people choose these movies to escape their mundane lives.
Despite the common criticism of only using one plot, Hallmark releases a new slew of movies every single year. In 2023, Hallmark released 42 new movies, allowing viewers to choose their flavor even though the options are all similar in plot.
The predictability of Hallmark movies also makes them enjoyable to watch with friends! Watching a poorly acted scene with an obvious green screen and romantic fluff dialogue inspires laughs from even the most diehard Hallmark fans, and it is very uniting to laugh together at a fun Christmas romance. These movies are fantasy escapes for people because nothing realistic happens in any of these movies, which is why people turn to them again and again.
So Hallmark movies may be cringey, they may have dialogue so on-the-nose a fifth grader could have written the scene, and the plot may be a generic rendition of the same movie for the fiftieth time. Still, everyone chooses these comfort movies year after year because it is fun to imagine a world where Christmas is always white with snow and romance is always possible.