Ah, the holidays, that season of sensory delights. A Christmas tree twinkling in the corner, the scent of cinnamon wafting through the air, and on the television, a wholesome, snow-draped fantasy film driven by one pivotal question: What if Frosty the Snowman could fuck?
Alas, this is not a joke. The movie Hot Frosty takes place shortly before Christmas in a small town called Hope Springs. A grieving young widow named Kathy impulsively drapes a scarf over a hunky snow sculpture in the public square—which brings the snowman to life, in the flesh, wearing the magic scarf and a charming smile and absolutely nothing else. Unlike the Frosty of song, who celebrates his newfound sentience with a day of childish frivolity before thumping away into the hills to die, this snowman imprints like an orphaned duckling on the woman who made him a real boy, and hijinks ensue—as does romance, eventually.
Hot Frosty is part of Netflix’s holiday film slate, a collection of Hallmark Channel–esque romances that drop every December in honor of the Christmas season. The more discerning critics among us would be forgiven for wondering why this tradition persists: These movies are the silliest sort of melodrama, intentionally schlocky and critically mocked—sometimes even by Netflix itself. And yet, they are massively popular, topping the platform’s most-watched list year after year—in its first week, Hot Frosty was viewed a staggering 16 million times—even when the consensus, from professional reviewers and normies alike, is that they’re genuinely bad.
It’s an intriguing paradox—why is everyone watching a movie that no one likes?—and one that reveals something profound about these films’ target audience.
Who are they for? One clue is in the casting, carefully designed to tweak the nostalgia of a millennial generation now approaching middle age. The stars of these films are 1990s-era celebrities who never quite broke out as adults—including Lindsay Lohan, who has found a second life as a Netflix rom-com ingenue for three years running. Her latest, out this month, is Our Little Secret, in which a pair of former lovers are reunited at Christmas after ten years because, as it turns out, his girlfriend and her boyfriend are siblings. Lohan’s fellow Mean Girls alumna Lacey Chabert, meanwhile, plays the lead in Hot Frosty. Yet another 2024 offering, The Merry Gentlemen—in which a Broadway star tries to save her small hometown’s theater with a half-naked, all-male dancing revue—features former One Tree Hill heartthrob Chad Michael Murray, whose 43 years have left him a bit more weathered in the face, but no less chiseled in the midsection.
This, too, is a crucial part of the formula: lots of sexual innuendo, but zero actual sex, making these movies a safe choice for millennial parents who want to watch with the kids around. But most importantly, like millennials, these films are self-conscious and self-referential; they don’t just know their audience, they make sure their audience knows they know. In one Hot Frosty scene, a television shows Falling for Christmas—yet another Netflix holiday romance, from 2022, which stars Lohan as an heiress who develops amnesia after a skiing mishap. Seeing it, Chabert quips, “That looks just like a girl I went to high school with”—a little fan service for the Mean Girls generation.
That Netflix is so obviously targeting a millennial audience with holiday romances may seem strange, considering our notorious cynicism when it comes to matters of the heart. We are, after all, the generation that delays marriage or eschews it, disdains monogamy, and talks about “catching feelings” from casual partners in the same way people in previous eras talked about contracting an STD. Single millennial women lament the dearth of qualified suitors, or even just non-trash men; the married ones divorce their husbands as an exercise in self-actualization and write memoirs about it. The entire big-screen rom-com genre as we knew it is dead, because millennials killed it—and yet, we keep watching these Christmas films, consuming them like the plate of subpar, slightly stale sugar cookies that you eat just because they’re there. . . and because, loath as you are to admit it, you do sometimes want something sweet.
Here we may begin to discern the brilliance of the Netflix holiday romance: Beneath all that ironic winking, nodding, and throwing-back to Y2K-era cultural products, this is the same stuff that classic movies are made of. Our Little Secret—about the former lovers—is a remarriage comedy akin to the 1940 masterpiece The Philadelphia Story, reimagined for the digital age. Hot Frosty uses a goofy supernatural premise to explore themes of grief and self-actualization; nearly 80 years ago, The Ghost and Mrs. Muir did the same. And The Merry Gentlemen might seem like nothing more than a bowl of seasonal eye candy—“Magic Mike, but make it Christmas,” as New York Times writer Amanda Hess described it—but with its Broadway protagonist home for the holidays, what it actually is, really, is “White Christmas but make it Chippendales.”
These are stories about romantic love, yes, but also the love of humanity, the ties that bind us—at all moments, but especially in the long, dark days that surround the winter solstice, when we most keenly feel the ache of cold and loneliness alike.
White Christmas and its ilk were made at a time when the need for stories like this was plain to see: The ghastly, grimdark memory of World War II loomed in the background of even the most uplifting tale. The heroine of Holiday Affair (1949) is a widow, mourning the soldier who never came home; in Miracle on 34th Street (1947), a Dutch war orphan is delighted when Santa Claus speaks her native language. Dennis Morgan, the dreamboat Navy man who steals Barbara Stanwyck’s heart in Christmas in Connecticut (1945), starts off the film literally dreaming in a literal boat after his submarine was attacked by the Germans. These movies speak of redemption, and family, and camaraderie, and above all, hope. At a time of staggering loss, America needed them. They are rarely, if ever, overtly religious, yet they are nevertheless endowed with the shimmering presence of faith—if not in God, then in goodness.
In 2024, such earnestness is seen as naive at best, reactionary at worst. The modern attention economy thrives on feel-bad stories designed to make us fear and mistrust each other, and optimism is in short supply. The faith that animates classic holiday stories has been replaced by a sense that it is vaguely embarrassing to believe in anything, be it God or magic or the power of love—the entire concept of which has been called into question by the one-two punch of the sexual and digital revolutions. One of the results is a repudiation of the original Christmas romance, perhaps best demonstrated by the annual spate of think pieces dedicated to slamming Love Actually (2003), one of the few post-Y2K Christmas movies that even attempts to recapture the spirit of the season in the same way the classics did—for its misogyny, its heteronormativity, its “pre #MeToo imagining of high romance.”
That love itself is now coded as cringe likely explains the current state of the Christmas romance: low budget, direct-to-streaming, and imbued with winking cynicism where the earnestness used to be. What Netflix holiday films share, and what sets them apart from the broader tradition, is how self-conscious, even self-deprecating, they are. The subtext of a movie like Hot Frosty, with its ludicrous premise, is that the audience is embarrassed to be watching it—and that it is the job of the filmmakers to give them permission to do so by assuring them that everyone, from the actors to the writers to the crew members blowing fake snow into the frame, is engaging with the story from an ironic distance.
Everything about this film screams “bad on purpose”: the Disney-fantasy color palette; the scenery-chewing side characters; the running gag about how Jack the Beefcake Snowman doesn’t get cold and hence is frequently shirtless, leading to rabid, horny pandemonium among the town’s female senior citizenry. The more somber scenes, like the one where Kathy reveals how she’s struggled since her husband died, are superficial pantomimes of real human emotion, like the dusting of confectioner’s sugar on the roof of a gingerbread house: all sweetness, no depth, and adorning something obviously fake. “I’m getting grief counseling from a snowman,” Kathy says, lest anyone was at risk of taking any of this seriously.
If this gives the annual Netflix holiday romance somewhat less staying power than the classic films of yore, it’s also the secret of their success. The disposability of these movies makes them the perfect offering in a world where people are gloomy, guarded, and vaguely suspicious of anything that might make them feel good: a steaming hot cup of Christmas enchantment with a side of plausible deniability. It’s not that these stories speak to you, or make you feel anything. You don’t actually believe in magic, or Santa Claus, or the spirit of the season that can spark joy in even the smallest and hardest of hearts. And if anyone asks, you were absolutely not crying in that moment where it seemed like it might all be over for the sweet, small-town widow and the hunky snowman who taught her, against all odds, to love again; you just had a piece of tinsel in your eye.
