Christmas movies that have faded from cultural memory

If you’re thinking, “Oh, they made a Christmas movie about that aardvark,” that is not the case. That’s how forgettable this movie is. Arthur is Arthur Claus, Santa’s son that we all know so well. This is a generic, bumbling-son-makes-good movie, and it’s also quite British so maybe it had more of an impact there.

They had the audacity to make a “Bad Moms” sequel. The original 2016 film “Bad Moms” is wholly generic, almost offensively so, and then they cashed in with the most-obvious sequel idea possible. In addition to having it be a Christmas movie, the titular bad moms have to deal with their moms. Even though, inexplicably, this was also a box-office success, plans for another sequel were mercifully scrapped. Maybe when they couldn’t think of another thuddingly obvious idea with two seconds of thought they decided to call it quits.

If you think it’s unfair to call a 1940s Christmas movie “forgotten,” “It’s a Wonderful Life” came out the next year, and “Holiday Inn” came out in 1942. The film is a screwball comedy about a down-on-his-luck actor who has Christmas dinner with a rich family. It was actually a Christmas TV staple in the ‘60s and ‘70s, apparently, but unlike some other movies of the era it fell by the wayside.

By 2006, casting Danny DeVito and Matthew Broderick as your leads in a Christmas comedy wasn’t the best sign. You would really need to nail the execution for such a film to work. “Deck the Halls” very much did not nail the execution. The film is a slim tale of two neighbors warring over their Christmas decorations. While one could imagine such a movie being perfectly serviceable, it was probably always going to be forgotten. However, “Deck the Halls” was a critical flop and didn’t make its budget back in box-office returns, so it was DOA on that front.

We had dual remembrances here: “Oh yeah, that movie!” and then “Oh yeah, that’s a Christmas movie!” Nicolas Cage’s performance isn’t terribly ambitious in this fantasy Christmas movie. Cage plays a rich Wall Street guy who steps into an alternate reality where he stayed with his college girlfriend and became, well, a family man. That feels like it had the potential to become a Christmas staple…save for the fact “It’s a Wonderful Life” already existed.

This may be the nadir of movies trying to milk the Vince Vaughn persona. As you can probably guess, Vaughn plays Santa’s ne’er-do-well brother. It’s a lot, even for a Christmas movie. “Fred Claus” doesn’t go full “Bad Santa,” so it just ends up being an irritating comedy with a protagonist that is not a good hang over the run of a full film.

Sure, it’s easier for Netflix movies to fall from our collective memories, but even by those standards “Holidate” has swiftly disappeared. After all, we remember those movies where Kurt Russell plays Santa Claus. It’s a wholly generic “young adults trying to find love around the holiday season” with an unremarkable cast. It does feel like Netflix just wanted a Christmas rom-com churned out, and that’s what it got. Also, the director of this movie directed “Deck the Halls” as well. He really has not served the Christmas canon well.

This Christmas rom-com has quite the cast, though an unexpected one. Janet Leigh, one of the early scream queens, is romanced by Robert Mitchum. Mitchum largely played heavies and private eyes in his career, and he worked well in that realm. “Holiday Affair” arrived before he was a movie star, though, and also he had just been busted for marijuana possession and served time for it, so this was supposed to rehabilitate his image. Maybe it did, but the cultural impact of “Holiday Affair” did not stand the test of time.

If you were a tween girl circa 1998 maybe “I’ll be Home for Christmas” has stuck with you. For everybody else, it’s completely gone by the wayside. That’s not surprising, given that this was a Jonathan Taylor Thomas vehicle. Remember when vehicles for JTT existed? Like the Olsen twins, a time came when Thomas was aging out of the kid roles that made him famous. Also like the Olsen twins, it didn’t quite take.

Which is the more-forgotten film that has the words “love” and “Cooper” in the title: This one, or “I Love You Beth Cooper?” The cast for this movie we truly did not remember is incredible. Everybody from Timothee Chalamet to June Squibb! John Goodman and Diane Keaton are in it! This is your usual, run-of-the-mill dysfunctional family dramedy. There is a school of thought that if a movie has an incredible cast and you’ve never heard of it, odds are that’s because it is terrible. “Love the Coopers” could be submitted as evidence for that theory.

We remember seeing the poster for “The Man Who Invented Christmas” and chuckling to ourselves, “This movie is going to be a blip.” Nailed that one! Instead of making another version of “A Christmas Carol,” this movie is about Charles Dickens writing “A Christmas Carol.” Why watch “Jaws” when you could just watch a video of Peter Benchley writing “Jaws?”

Nora Ephron’s filmography (both as a writer and as a director) is full of successes. She essentially shaped the rom-com genre in the ‘90s. There are some misses in the mix, though, and Ephron really did not have a sense of how to handle dark comedy. “Mixed Nuts” is an example of this. It’s a film about the wacky misadventures of the callers to, and proprietors of, a suıcide-prevention hotline. There are people who could take such a premise and mine pitch-black comedy out of it, but Ephron was not one of those people. “Mixed Nuts” bombed and has been ejected from the Christmas comedy canon with great force.

You see a poster for a Disney movie featuring Anna Kendrick decked out in Santa gear to play a character named Noelle and you immediately get the sense that, like, five seconds went into the thought process here. All of that circa 2019 totally makes sense, but also doesn’t exactly scream high-effort filmmaking. Of course, this one also went directly to Disney+, which was a pivot from Disney. The decision makers there probably also saw the writing on the wall and figured a movie like “Noelle” was best left to populate streaming service options.

No, not the owls movie. Somehow this film is even dumber. “Rise of the Guardians” takes a bunch of generic cultural characters and tries to high-fantasy the hell out of them. The Easter Bunny’s name is E. Aster Bunnymund, and yes that rise in your core temperature is your blood boiling at how dumb that is. Of course, we’re talking Christmas, and this is a North Pole-heavy movie centered on Jack Frost and Santa Claus. The only people thinking about this movie are those railing against the silliness of the main conceit.

If we were to tell you that within the last five years Will Ferrell and Ryan Reynolds starred in an adaptation of “A Christmas Carol,” you’d likely respond, “That’s a lie. This is a weird lie and I don’t know why you are saying that.” It’s a musical with original songs and all that! The reason basically nobody saw it and nobody remembers it, though, is that it was an Apple TV original aka the streaming service where movies go to die.

Four screenwriters for a Christmas romcom doesn’t bode well. “Surviving Christmas” starred Ben Affleck at a time when he was starting to see his star wane. This movie, an absolute bomb, played a role in his film career careening off the road. This is a deranged film with a bizarre, illogical premise. That’s even by the standards of a holiday romcom.

Though he got to ride the genius of Kristen Wiig when he directed (the slightly overrated) “Bridesmaids,” Paul Feig’s filmography is pretty awful. He directed “Last Christmas,” which may eventually be forgotten but for now is remembered for having a twist that is truly stupid in the climax. “Unaccompanied Minors” was the first time a studio gave Feig a chance to direct a movie, maybe because he had played such a key role in “Freaks and Geeks” and thus knew how to work with kids. After all, the whole premise of “Unaccompanied Minors” is built around the titular unaccompanied minors (the term used for kids flying without an adult) stuck at the airport thanks to a blizzard.

A Krampus horror movie was bound to happen, and “Krampus” turned out perfectly fine. It’s just “perfectly fine” wasn’t enough for the movie to have any legs. The titular character, an Olde World bogeyman who punishes the “naughty” at Christmastime, was having a moment in the 2010s, and this movie tried to capitalize on that. It did pretty well, and horror-movie fans tend to be easy judges, but the cultural wave crested pretty quickly.