A scene from Love the Coopers, a new holiday family flick.Suzanne Tenner/The Associated Press
The test of a truly great Christmas movie is not in its opening weekend, it's in the years that follow.
It's with that understanding that Love the Coopers writer Steven Rogers will evaluate how his ensemble family flick does, noting it's the film's afterlife that will really determine whether he has a hit on his hands.
"Absolutely [making an enduring favourite is] what you aspire to," says Rogers in a recent interview from Los Angeles, listing some of the Christmas-themed films that have become personal staples over the years.
"I remember watching It's a Wonderful Life when I was really young for the first time and just going around to everyone saying, 'Do people know about this?' I thought it was the most remarkable movie."
The canon of beloved holiday fare is deep and diverse, with well-worn family faves including Miracle on 34th Street, Home Alone and A Christmas Story and newer entries such as Elf and Frozen. Meanwhile, more tangential Christmas-set flicks such as Die Hard and In Bruges have staked their claim to audiences looking to escape overly cloying fare.
But that hasn't stopped Hollywood from trying to create a new holiday classic year after year, and there's a bevy of contenders this season including the Seth Rogen comedy The Night Before and the upcoming horror flick Krampus. Meanwhile, the Canadian spine-chiller A Christmas Horror Story continues a theatrical roll-out to Edmonton, Ottawa and Saskatoon on Dec. 11 in addition to its recent DVD release.
"You always hope that your holiday movie will become a classic because then it can be the gift that keeps on giving every year when people go to seek it out and download it or buy it," says box office analyst Paul Dergarabedian.
But Scrooged scribe Mitch Glazer says it's not easy to craft a holiday tale, noting it can easily veer into saccharine territory if you're not careful.
"You don't want to be cynical and sentimental – meaning manipulative in a crass way – but you are dealing with the Christmas season," says Glazer, who scored a holiday classic with his 1988 adaptation of the Charles Dickens novel A Christmas Carol, starring Bill Murray as a pompous TV boss.
"That's why we felt confident having A Christmas Carol as the basis for Scrooged, this kind of eternal, perfect Dickensian structure and the three ghosts. It had a real rock-solid proven [premise], and then it has a real hard edge to it, given the season and all."
Catherine O'Hara says making a Christmas classic all comes down to the story, in explaining the enduring appeal of Home Alone, in which she played the panicked mom to Macaulay Culkin's eight-year-old Kevin, who is left behind during Christmas vacation.
"There is something really special about empowering children to feel like when everything falls apart they can actually still – not only survive – but be the hero," says O'Hara, whose film marks its 25th anniversary this year.
Story has to be paramount, agrees Glazer, noting that's how he and his long-time pal Murray approached Scrooged.
Selling a Christmas movie's ability to survive beyond the season is key.
When pitching Love the Coopers, Rogers says he found some studios feared a Christmas movie narrowed the audience too much.
"A lot of countries don't celebrate Christmas so that cuts them out, supposedly. But I think [the film is] about family, so I didn't necessarily agree with that," he says.
Any calculated approach to create the next big holiday classic, with guaranteed TV airings every year, is doomed to fail, says film programmer Jesse Wente.
"As soon as you decide, 'I'm going to make a cult classic,' you are immediately opted out of ever making a cult classic," he says, citing the 2011 Garry Marshall film New Year's Eve as smacking of that kind of artifice.
"Cult classics are something defined by the audience."