25 Best Christmas Movies to Watch, Ranked

Most lists of Christmas movies to watch run to 50 or 100 titles with one line each. This one has 25, counted down to the best, with the budget, the box office and both Rotten Tomatoes scores for every film. It also has the filmmaking stories: the fake snow, the backlot towns and the house that was built inside a school gym.

Three of the best Christmas movies opened in summer. Three are TV specials from the 1960s that families still watch every December. And the film at #1 lost money when it came out.

The Best Christmas Movies at a Glance

#	Film	Year	Type	Critics / audiences	Box office
25	The Christmas Chronicles	2018	Family adventure	67% / 76%	Netflix
24	Jingle All the Way	1996	Family comedy	20% / 42%	$130M
23	Bad Santa	2003	Comedy for grown-ups	78% / 75%	$77M
22	Arthur Christmas	2011	Animated comedy	93% / 77%	$147M
21	The Holiday	2006	Romantic comedy	51% / 80%	$205M
20	Scrooged	1988	Comedy	75% / 71%	$60M (US)
19	The Polar Express	2004	Animated adventure	55% / 64%	$286M
18	The Santa Clause	1994	Family comedy	74% / 66%	$190M
17	Klaus	2019	Animated family film	95% / 96%	Netflix
16	The Holdovers	2023	Drama with laughs	97% / 92%	$46M
15	Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer	1964	Stop-motion TV special	95% / 84%	TV special
14	Gremlins	1984	Horror comedy	87% / 78%	$148M (US)
13	White Christmas	1954	Musical	75% / 89%	$12M (US rentals)
12	The Nightmare Before Christmas	1993	Stop-motion musical	95% / 92%	$50M (US)
11	Love Actually	2003	Romantic comedy	65% / 72%	$245M
10	A Charlie Brown Christmas	1965	Animated TV special	86% / 93%	TV special
9	Miracle on 34th Street	1947	Family classic	96% / 87%	Not published
8	The Muppet Christmas Carol	1992	Family musical	79% / 86%	$35M
7	How the Grinch Stole Christmas!	1966	Animated TV special	100% / 94%	TV special
6	Die Hard	1988	Action	94% / 94%	$144M
5	A Christmas Story	1983	Family comedy	87% / 89%	$19M (US)
4	National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation	1989	Comedy	72% / 86%	$71M (US)
3	Elf	2003	Family comedy	85% / 79%	$220M
2	Home Alone	1990	Family comedy	66% / 81%	$477M
1	It’s a Wonderful Life	1946	Drama	94% / 95%	$3.3M

Rotten Tomatoes critic and audience scores as of 2 November 2026. Box office is worldwide on first release unless marked US. Home Alone, Die Hard and The Muppet Christmas Carol include re-releases.

Audiences liked The Holiday far more than critics did, at 80% against 51%. Arthur Christmas goes the other way, with 93% from critics and 77% from audiences.

25) The Christmas Chronicles (2018)

Kurt Russell plays Santa in a Netflix adventure where two kids crash his sleigh in Chicago on Christmas Eve.

Kate and Teddy Pierce set up a camera to catch Santa on Christmas Eve, sneak into his sleigh and make him crash it. Now they have to help him save Christmas before morning. Chris Columbus produced it, and the script started life as a found-footage idea called 12/24.

All eight reindeer are digital. Method Studios in Vancouver matched them to the riding rigs used on set, and the North Pole crowd scene has 250 background elves. Russell’s beard is mostly his own. He also sings Elvis’s “Santa Claus Is Back in Town” in a jail cell, backed by Little Steven and the Disciples of Soul.

24) Jingle All the Way (1996)

Arnold Schwarzenegger spends Christmas Eve hunting for the one toy his son wants, and so does every other parent in town.

Howard Langston forgot to buy a Turbo Man figure, the toy of the year, and every store is sold out. He spends Christmas Eve racing a mailman named Myron through malls, a radio station and a warehouse full of fake Santas. Critics gave it 20%, the lowest score on this list, and it still made $129.8 million.

It shot for five weeks in Minnesota from April 1996, including the Mall of America, where about 5,000 people turned up to watch. A real snowstorm hit on the first day, and the crew spent the morning melting it with a fire truck. The Turbo Man parade was filmed on the New York Street backlot at Universal Studios Hollywood.

23) Bad Santa (2003)

Billy Bob Thornton plays a drunk safecracker who takes a job as a mall Santa so he can rob the store.

Willie and his partner Marcus work a different mall every December. This year a lonely kid named Thurman attaches himself to Willie, and the con starts to come apart. It’s rated R and very rude, and it was John Ritter’s last live-action film. It’s dedicated to him.

Universal passed on the script and called it anti-Christmas and anti-children. Dimension Films made it instead. After a bad test screening, the studio wanted reshoots with more heart. Zwigoff refused, so Todd Phillips shot them, including the boxing lesson. Thornton later told Entertainment Weekly he really was drunk in the scene where Willie falls apart on the mall’s Santa set.

22) Arthur Christmas (2011)

Santa’s clumsy younger son has until dawn to deliver the one present the North Pole’s high-tech operation missed.

Santa’s elder son Steve runs Christmas like a military operation from a giant sleigh called the S-1. When one child’s present gets missed, Arthur, Grandsanta and an elf named Bryony take the old sleigh and the old reindeer to deliver it. Aardman, the studio behind Wallace and Gromit, made it with Sony.

Pre-production ran for about 18 months at Aardman before the animation moved to Sony Pictures Imageworks in Culver City. Arthur has 511,716 hairs on his head, and Santa’s beard and hair add up to over 900,000 strands. Director Sarah Smith said some shots took 24 hours per frame to render.

21) The Holiday (2006)

Cameron Diaz and Kate Winslet swap houses for Christmas, Los Angeles for a cottage in an English village, and each falls for someone new.

Amanda runs a movie trailer company in LA, Iris writes a society column for a London newspaper, and both have just been let down by men. They swap homes for two weeks. Amanda meets Iris’s brother Graham. Iris meets a film composer named Miles and an old screenwriter named Arthur, played by Eli Wallach at 90.

Rosehill Cottage doesn’t exist. Meyers couldn’t find the cottage she pictured, so the crew built the outside in an empty field near the church in Shere, Surrey. The shell went up in four days. Jude Law said she “hired a field and drew it, and someone built it.” The inside was a set on a stage in Los Angeles.

20) Scrooged (1988)

Bill Murray plays a cruel TV boss producing a live Christmas Carol, and three ghosts give him the Scrooge treatment.

Frank Cross runs the IBC network and fires a man two days before Christmas for disagreeing with him. That night the ghost of his old boss warns him, and three more ghosts follow: a cab driver, a fairy who hits him with a toaster and a hooded figure with a TV screen for a face.

Makeup artists Tom and Bari Burman built the Ghost of Christmas Future around a six-foot mechanical hand. Donner dropped the planned skull head and asked for a TV screen instead. Carol Kane’s slapstick was real too. She pulled Murray’s lip so hard she tore it, and filming stopped while he healed. It earned an Oscar nomination for Best Makeup.

19) The Polar Express (2004)

A boy who has stopped believing in Santa boards a night train to the North Pole on Christmas Eve.

Robert Zemeckis turned Chris Van Allsburg’s 1985 picture book into a feature, and Tom Hanks plays most of the grown-ups: the conductor, the hobo, Santa and the boy’s father. He also performed the boy’s movements and narrates as the boy grown up. It was the most expensive animated film made up to then, and it earned three Oscar nominations.

Every frame came from performance capture. Actors worked inside a box 10 feet by 10 feet, ringed by dozens of cameras, with about 150 markers on each face. The crew captured 50 gigabytes of data a day. Zemeckis said shooting it in live action would have cost $1 billion.

18) The Santa Clause (1994)

Tim Allen startles Santa off his roof, puts on the suit and finds out the fine print has made him the new Santa.

Scott Calvin is a divorced toy company executive who has his son Charlie for Christmas Eve. After Santa falls, Scott reads the card in the suit, flies to the North Pole and learns he has until next Thanksgiving to get ready. Over the next months he gains weight and grows a white beard that comes back every time he shaves.

Disney’s D23 says the makeup and fat suits took Allen’s waist from 32 to 53 inches. The film cast 125 children as elves who are meant to be centuries old. It was shot in Hollywood and in Oakville, Ontario, which plays Lakeside, Illinois.

17) Klaus (2019)

A spoiled postman and a lonely toymaker accidentally invent Santa Claus in a frozen town at war with itself.

Jesper is sent to Smeerensburg, an island town where two families have feuded for generations, and has to post 6,000 letters in a year or lose his inheritance. He finds Klaus, a woodsman with a shed full of toys, and their deliveries slowly make the town kind. It won the BAFTA for Animated Film, seven Annie Awards and an Oscar nomination.

Every character was drawn by hand. A lighting tool built by a French studio then added up to eight layers of light to each shot, so the 2D drawings look 3D. Pablos wanted to show where hand-drawn animation might have gone if Hollywood hadn’t switched to computers. Most studios passed on it before Netflix bought it in 2017.

16) The Holdovers (2023)

A grumpy teacher, a grieving cook and a troubled student are stuck together at an empty boarding school over Christmas 1970.

Paul Hunham teaches classics at a New England prep school and gets stuck minding the boys with nowhere to go for Christmas. Soon only Angus is left, along with Mary Lamb, the cook, whose son was killed in Vietnam. Da’Vine Joy Randolph won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress, one of five nominations, including Best Picture.

It was shot digitally on an ARRI Alexa Mini, then finished to look like a print from 1970. The team added grain, a slight wobble copied from real 35mm film and chemical stains on some frames. The camera stayed on tripods and dollies, never a gimbal or Steadicam. Even the Focus Features and Miramax logos at the start were redesigned in a 1970s style.

15) Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer (1964)

The stop-motion special about a reindeer whose glowing nose makes him an outcast, until the night Santa needs it.

Rudolph runs away with Hermey, an elf who wants to be a dentist, and meets Yukon Cornelius and the Island of Misfit Toys. In the 1964 broadcast, Rudolph never went back for the misfit toys. Viewers wrote in, and a new scene of Santa picking them up was added in 1965.

Rankin/Bass had it animated frame by frame at a studio in Tokyo, in a process it called Animagic. The Rudolph puppet stood about 6 inches tall and Santa about 11. Most of the puppets melted in a hot attic after the shoot, but the surviving Rudolph and Santa sold at auction in 2020 for $368,000.

14) Gremlins (1984)

A teenager gets a cute creature for Christmas, breaks all three of its rules and lets loose a town full of monsters.

Billy’s dad buys him a mogwai named Gizmo in Chinatown, with three rules: no bright light, no water and never feed him after midnight. All three get broken by Christmas Eve, and Kingston Falls fills with gremlins. Like Die Hard, it opened in summer, on the same day as Ghostbusters.

There’s no CGI. Chris Walas’s effects shop built 12 Gizmo puppets and 14 for Stripe, the gang leader. The snowy town is Universal’s Courthouse Square backlot under fake snow, the same square that became Hill Valley in Back to the Future. Columbus’s first draft was far darker, and Steven Spielberg, the executive producer, insisted Gizmo stay cute.

13) White Christmas (1954)

Bing Crosby and Danny Kaye follow a sister act to a Vermont inn with no snow and put on a show to save their old general’s business.

Bob and Phil served together in World War II and became song-and-dance stars. They follow the Haynes sisters to a ski lodge in Vermont, find their old commander running it with no snow and no guests, and stage a Christmas show to fill it. The title song first appeared in Holiday Inn (1942), and Crosby sings it again here.

It was the first film shot in VistaVision, Paramount’s widescreen process, which ran 35mm film sideways through the camera for a bigger, sharper image. By most accounts, Crosby and Kaye’s drag version of “Sisters” grew out of clowning on set, and Crosby’s laughter in the take is real.

12) The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993)

Jack Skellington, the Pumpkin King of Halloween Town, finds Christmas Town and decides to run Christmas himself.

Jack is bored of Halloween. He kidnaps Santa, has Halloween Town make the presents and delivers them himself, which goes badly. Sally, a rag doll, sees it coming. Disney released it under its Touchstone label because it worried the film was too dark for kids.

The crew built 227 puppets in a San Francisco warehouse, and Jack had around 400 heads to swap for his expressions. They shot 109,440 frames over about three years. Danny Elfman wrote most of the songs before there was a script and sings Jack’s songs himself. Chris Sarandon does Jack’s speaking voice.

11) Love Actually (2003)

About ten love stories cross London in the five weeks before Christmas, from the Prime Minister to a washed-up rock star.

Hugh Grant’s Prime Minister falls for a member of his staff, Emma Thompson finds out a necklace wasn’t meant for her, and Bill Nighy’s rock star records a cynical Christmas single for the money. It’s rated R, so save it for after the kids go to bed.

Curtis planned 14 stories and cut four, two of them after they were filmed. Grant called his dance through Downing Street to “Jump (For My Love)” absolute hell, and he never rehearsed it. The arrivals montage at Heathrow shows real travelers, not actors.

10) A Charlie Brown Christmas (1965)

Charlie Brown picks the saddest tree on the lot and asks what Christmas is really all about.

Charlie Brown is depressed by how commercial Christmas has become, so Lucy makes him director of the Christmas play. He comes back with a tiny real tree instead of an aluminum one, everyone laughs, and Linus explains what Christmas means on an empty stage. It runs about 25 minutes.

CBS executives found it slow. Schulz refused a laugh track and insisted on Linus’s Bible reading. The voices are real children, some too young to read, so Melendez fed them their lines one at a time. The animation was squeezed into about four months and finished days before it aired.

9) Miracle on 34th Street (1947)

Macy’s hires a department store Santa who says he really is Kris Kringle, and a lawyer has to prove it in court.

Doris Walker, a divorced Macy’s executive, hires Kris to replace a drunk Santa in the Thanksgiving parade. He sends shoppers to Gimbels when Macy’s doesn’t have what they want, then ends up in court over whether he’s sane. It won three Oscars, including Best Supporting Actor for Edmund Gwenn, and was nominated for Best Picture.

The parade in the film is the real 1946 Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. Nine cameras filmed it live, and Gwenn rode the real Santa float. Most of the crowd didn’t know he was an actor. The store scenes were shot inside Macy’s on Herald Square at night, because the store was full of Christmas shoppers by day.

8) The Muppet Christmas Carol (1992)

Michael Caine plays Scrooge completely straight while Kermit, Miss Piggy and Gonzo play everyone around him.

Gonzo narrates as Charles Dickens, with Rizzo the Rat along to complain. Kermit is Bob Cratchit, Miss Piggy is his wife, and the songs are by Paul Williams. For a version without the Muppets, try the 1984 TV film with George C. Scott as Scrooge.

Caine told Henson he would play it “completely straight and completely committed.” The sets had floors that lifted out, so the puppeteers could work underneath while Caine walked on narrow planks between them. A song called “When Love Is Gone” was cut from the theatrical release, and Disney+ added it back in an extended version in 2022.

7) How the Grinch Stole Christmas! (1966)

Boris Karloff narrates the Dr. Seuss story of a green hermit who steals Christmas and finds out it came anyway.

In about 25 minutes the Grinch dresses up as Santa, ties antlers on his dog Max and empties Whoville of presents. Then he hears the Whos singing anyway, and his heart grows three sizes. It has the only 100% critic score on this list.

Chuck Jones, who directed Bugs Bunny cartoons at Warner Bros., used about 15,000 drawings for the half hour. He pitched it more than 20 times before a banking group agreed to pay for it. Jones and Seuss agreed the Grinch had to be green. The 2018 animated version, with Benedict Cumberbatch, made $553 million worldwide, counting re-releases.

6) Die Hard (1988)

A New York cop at his wife’s Christmas Eve office party takes on the thieves who seize the building.

John McClane flies to Los Angeles to see his wife Holly, and Hans Gruber’s gang takes her office party hostage on the 30th floor of Nakatomi Plaza. McClane has bare feet, a radio and one cop outside who believes him. Is it a Christmas movie? In a December 2025 YouGov poll, 44% of people who’d seen it said yes and 45% said no.

Nakatomi Plaza is Fox Plaza in Century City, next to the Fox lot and still under construction at the time. The view of the city outside the 30th floor is a 380-foot matte painting. For Hans Gruber’s fall, Alan Rickman was dropped backward onto an airbag, and the crew let go a count early to get real surprise on his face. The first take is in the film.

5) A Christmas Story (1983)

All Ralphie wants is a Red Ryder BB gun, and every adult he asks tells him he’ll shoot his eye out.

Ralphie Parker grows up in 1940s Indiana, and Jean Shepherd narrates as the grown-up Ralphie. There’s the leg lamp, the tongue on the flagpole and the department store Santa. It made $19.3 million in theaters and became a TV staple, and TNT started a 24-hour marathon of it in 1997.

The winter was too warm, so the crew used three kinds of fake snow: potato flakes falling, shredded vinyl on the sets and firefighting foam on the ground. Flick’s tongue never touched cold metal. A plastic sleeve with a tiny suction hole went over the pole. Higbee’s department store in Cleveland gave the crew four days of shooting.

4) National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation (1989)

Clark Griswold wants a perfect old-fashioned family Christmas and gets in-laws, Cousin Eddie’s RV and 25,000 lights that won’t switch on.

John Hughes based it on his own short story “Christmas ’59” from National Lampoon magazine. Clark counts on a Christmas bonus to pay for a pool, carves a dry turkey and loses a fight with a squirrel. Chris Columbus was set to direct and left after clashing with Chase, so it became Chechik’s first feature.

The Griswold house and street were built on the Warner Bros. Ranch in Burbank, and the house was also Roger Murtaugh’s home in Lethal Weapon. Location work started in March in Summit County, Colorado, so this Christmas film was shot in spring and summer. The trained squirrel died before its scene, so the one in the film is untrained.

3) Elf (2003)

Will Ferrell’s Buddy, a human raised by Santa’s elves, goes to New York to find the father who doesn’t know he exists.

Buddy crawled into Santa’s sack as a baby and grew up at the North Pole. He finds his father, Walter Hobbs, a children’s book publisher on the naughty list, and gets a job in the Gimbels toy department. Ferrell plays every scene with total sincerity, and it made $220.4 million on a $33 million budget.

Favreau fought to keep CGI out of it. The North Pole scenes use forced perspective, where two sets are built, one smaller than the other, so Buddy looks huge next to the elves. The animals are stop motion, a nod to the Rankin/Bass specials like Rudolph. The Gimbels scenes weren’t shot in New York. Favreau filmed them in the cafeteria of a former mental hospital outside Vancouver.

2) Home Alone (1990)

Left behind when his family flies to Paris, eight-year-old Kevin booby-traps the house against two burglars.

Kevin wishes his family would disappear, wakes up alone and fights off Harry and Marv on Christmas Eve with paint cans, a blowtorch and toy cars. It made $476.7 million worldwide, the most on this list. In a December 2025 YouGov poll of 52 Christmas movies, it was both the most seen and the most loved in America.

The outside is a real house in Winnetka, Illinois, but most of the inside was built in the gym of New Trier High School, and Kevin’s flooded basement was the school’s empty swimming pool. Our guide to where Home Alone was filmed has the rest. Warner Bros. shut the film down over its budget, and Fox picked it up the next day. John Candy plays Gus Polinski, the Polka King of the Midwest, who drives Kate toward Chicago in the back of his band’s rented truck. He shot his scenes in about 23 hours and was reportedly paid $414.

1) It’s a Wonderful Life (1946)

On Christmas Eve, an angel shows George Bailey what his town would look like if he had never been born.

George Bailey gives up every plan he has to keep his father’s Building and Loan open against Mr. Potter. When $8,000 goes missing on Christmas Eve, he wishes he’d never been born, and Clarence, an angel still waiting for his wings, shows him that world. It got five Oscar nominations, including Best Picture, and won none.

Movie snow used to be cornflakes painted white, and it crunched so loudly that dialogue had to be re-recorded. RKO’s effects team mixed a quiet new snow from fire-extinguisher foam, sugar, water and soap flakes, and used about 6,000 gallons of it. The winter scenes were shot in a heat wave in June and July 1946. The new snow won a technical award from the Academy.

When the Best Christmas Movies Were Made

The 1980s, 1990s and 2000s give this list five films each. The 1970s give it none, but that decade is when the older classics turned into traditions. Rudolph, A Charlie Brown Christmas and the Grinch were repeated every December. It’s a Wonderful Life’s copyright lapsed in 1974 after a clerical error, so stations could show it for free, and through the late 1970s and 1980s it ran over and over every Christmas. That’s how a film that lost money ended up at #1.

New Christmas movies now arrive by the dozen on TV and streaming. Hallmark alone lined up about 34 new holiday titles for 2026, up from 24 Christmas movies in 2025.

The Money Behind Christmas Movies

Home Alone made about $26 for every dollar it cost. Gremlins is second at about $13, and that’s from its first US run alone. Using the middle of each reported budget range, The Polar Express and Arthur Christmas cost the most and made the least per dollar after It’s a Wonderful Life, whose first run brought in about as much as it cost and still lost RKO money.

More Christmas Movies Worth Watching

• Home Alone 2: Lost in New York (1992): Kevin boards the wrong plane, lands in New York and runs into Harry and Marv again.
• Holiday Inn (1942): Bing Crosby sings “White Christmas” on film for the first time, 12 years before White Christmas.
• A Christmas Carol (1984): George C. Scott plays Scrooge in the TV film many fans rate as the best straight version of the Dickens story.
• How the Grinch Stole Christmas (2000): Jim Carrey plays the Grinch in Ron Howard’s live-action version.

Want the people behind these films? Meet the Christmas movie characters who made them classics, from George Bailey to Buddy the Elf.

FAQs About the Best Christmas Movies

The Final Cut on the Best Christmas Movies to Watch

If you watch one, make it It’s a Wonderful Life. If the kids are choosing, put on Home Alone or Elf. If you’ve seen all the classics, The Holdovers and Klaus are the newest films here and the two most likely to join them. Use the picker near the top to filter by mood, runtime and who’s watching, and mark the ones you’ve already seen this year.