Most overrated Christmas movie of all time?
I'm not really sure what is the most overrated Christmas movie of all time.
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National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation - sacrilege, I know, but I just don't get the continued love for it.
shareIt's a Wonderful Life, hands down. This movie flopped upon release and became a joke for decades until James Stewart died and NBC decided running it annually.
shareSeeing how it's featured in Home Alone, it seems it had already become a Christmas tradition before Stewart's death.
shareNo.
The reason why it was featured in Home Alone is that for decades, IAWL ran a ridiculous number of times because of a copyright lapse. It was often played as filler on local stations, sometimes at least a dozen times during a holiday season. At one point, it aired so frequently as filler that in some markets (like in NYC), it would be playing on multiple stations all at once. You'd, for example, turn on channel 11, see the tail end of the movie, flip to channel 9, see the middle part of the movie, and then flip to channel 13, and see the beginning. And then there would be, both versions of the movie, too (colorized, black and white).
So, the movie became like that song, "Grandma Got Run Over By a Reindeer". It was a movie that people found annoying but simply saw as a part of the holiday season because of how frequently it played, just as most people don't like GGROBAR but feel like it has to be played or referenced somehow in anything Christmas-related.
So yes, it had become a Christmas tradition by that point.
Ever considered that NBC just followed the annual tradition of all those other channels? Also:
"The film's elevation to the status of a beloved classic came three decades after its initial release, when it became a television staple during Christmas season in 1976. This came as a welcome surprise to Frank Capra and others involved with its production. "It's the damnedest thing I've ever seen", Capra told The Wall Street Journal in 1984. "The film has a life of its own now, and I can look at it like I had nothing to do with it. I'm like a parent whose kid grows up to be President. I'm proud ... but it's the kid who did the work. I didn't even think of it as a Christmas story when I first ran across it. I just liked the idea.""