This article will be about Hallmark Christmas movies and the impact of their brand
No one does Christmas quite like Hallmark. The channel has built its brand off of the holiday season. Unlike most other television networks, Hallmark remains a titan in the industry when it comes to ratings. Every year, viewers are sure to enjoy 40-50 new holiday movies for the network’s Countdown to Christmas, which kicks off in October. The “Hallmark” name has become synonymous with all things cliché. And Hallmark leans into it.
Year after year, when the lineup of movies is announced, the promotional posters nearly always feature a man and a woman, in a red and green sweater respectively, along with “Christmas” worked somewhere into the title. Hallmark has never made a secret of their blatant “copy-and-paste” model. And why should they? More than 80 million people tune in to watch their movies every year, and it’s not because they’re looking for stimulating, Oscar-worthy performances.
When people watch a Hallmark movie, they aren’t looking for movies that are cutting-edge or pioneering a new cinematic technique. People simply want to be entertained. In an age where filmmakers keep being pushed to break conventions and do something “different,” there is comfort in watching a channel where you know what you’re getting every single time.
You’d be hard pressed to find a Hallmark Christmas movie that doesn’t involve their signature conventions. Content has been noted as feeling recyclable, but that’s the entire point. “Every movie is essentially a reincarnation of another,” noted Lacy Jungman on her blog defending her love of the movies. But when people sit down and turn on the channel, it’s a nice escape from the realities of the world, as the blog post also notes.
In the world of Hallmark, everything is simple: “the big city” is bad, small town living is good, and every career woman needs a country bumpkin to help her understand the true meaning of Christmas. Most movies start out with a basic plot: a city girl goes to a small, oddly holiday-obsessed town, usually on some capitalist quest to tear down a local business. Of course, one man stands in her way. The two inevitably fall in love. Usually, movies are capped off by some celebration or festival that is unique to that town, and, after renouncing her big city heritage, the former career-obsessed woman seals her fate to the local farmer-baker-ambiguous tradesman with a chaste, PG-approved kiss. Every movie seems to reference “the true meaning of Christmas…” Whatever that means.
If you think I just described a formula, you’d be right. “Hallmark doesn’t want to mess with success,” as one article observes. “Hence, [there are] strict rules for writers.” Screenwriters are given limited wiggle room when it comes to drafting scripts for new Christmas movies every year. They’re given three weeks to write new drafts, and each Hallmark movie must have nine acts and eight commercial breaks. The meet cute (where the two leads meet for the first time and a plot is born) always needs to be in the first act. Characters must verbally express their goals over the course of the movie, so there’s no cause for confusion among viewers.
The formula of the movies extends to its lack of diversity as well. Hallmark has always been known for portraying a very distinctive societal norm. Characters are regularly depicted as white, heteronormative, able-bodied, and upper-middle-class.
In the world of Hallmark, things like racism or social justice issues in general don’t really exist. The closest you could probably find would be a plot revolving around a protestor of “big business” outside a local Christmas tree farm. And surely, she’d end up falling in love with the CEO while teaching him to care about more than filling his pocketbook by the movie’s end.
But the predictability of Hallmark movies through reinforcing traditional status quo identities has led to public backlash.
After calls for increased diversity, Hallmark released six movies in 2022 that cast racial and ethnic minorities as leads. And out of the thirty-one films released in total that year, only one featured a same-sex couple. This overwhelming adherence to the predominating ideal that love’s prototypical form is white, heteronormative, and free of oppression is an intentional depiction. The audience of Hallmark movies leans conservative, with a target age demographic upwards of 30. Certainly, the channel still has a long way to go in terms of representation.
Yet it seems that the appeal of Hallmark often transcends any political or social leanings. Careful brand strategies have sought to appeal to traditional conservative audiences without being explicit with its agenda or values. “[The movies] might skew toward social conservatism, but the network isn’t telling these stories in hopes of making Christmas great again, at least not in a way where the movies preach such a message to your face,” said one Vox article.
This balancing act has served Hallmark well. It helps them appeal to audiences, both old and new, while still retaining the core of what makes them uniquely Hallmark: their irrepressible commitment to the holiday spirit (love, joy, etc.).
Loyal viewers can also vouch for the satisfaction felt in seeing their favorite actors reappear annually on the small screen. The network has been known to use the same actors over and over again. “Hallmark has essentially created an endless media ecosystem just for itself,” the Vox article commented. Part of the network’s brand has been built off of fan favorite actresses such as “Mean Girls” alum Lacey Chabert and “Full House” star Candace Cameron Bure. The two have been in over fifty Hallmark movies combined.
And that’s just the women. Studly men that have won the hearts of Hallmark viewers have been given their own form of recognition. There’s an entire Instagram page, appropriately titled “Hunks of Hallmark,” that is dedicated to spotlighting the recurring male leads of each movie.
View this profile on Instagram
The comfort of these films seems to be increased tenfold when viewers are already familiar with the stars. “People want to see their favorites over and over again in different situations, and that really speaks to the great stable of talent that we’ve built up over the years and how passionately our audience feels about them,” said Lisa Hamilton Daly, vice-president of programming at Hallmark.
It’s clear that whether you’re switching to the Hallmark channel for your daily dose of Christmas spirit or simply to make fun, the movies do offer an endless source of fodder for the whole family. Whether you look at the movies as timeless classics or through the lens of parodying TikToks, you can count on Hallmark to produce year after year. And maybe this holiday season, we’ll finally learn what the true meaning of Christmas really is.
