The two comedies opened on the same date in 2003 and have stood the test of time. A changing Hollywood landscape might make another such day impossible.
On Nov. 7, 2003, American audiences had the opportunity to see either “Elf” or “Love Actually” for the very first time in theaters. They could find themselves humming “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” along with Will Ferrell or sobbing to “Both Sides Now” with Emma Thompson. They could imagine themselves running through Central Park to save Santa or dashing through Heathrow to catch their beloved before a flight. And chances are, many of the moviegoers who watched those films on that fateful day in November have revisited them since. After all, both have become bona fide seasonal classics.
Every year around this time, you’re likely to turn on the television and find one of them playing. “Love Actually,” the British multistory rom-com, has been debated to within an inch of its life. (Is it sweet? Cynical? Romantic? Fatphobic?) The broader Will Ferrell comedy “Elf” has been adapted into a Broadway musical and an animated TV special. You can even look up how to make Buddy the Elf’s spaghetti doused in M&Ms and chocolate syrup.
“Elf” was an immediate hit, topping the box office during its second weekend and ultimately grossing about $220 million worldwide. “Love Actually,” which opened in limited release, had a slower burn but eventually grossed $244 million worldwide. Both now seem like relics of a different time — an era when movies received the kind of dedicated theatrical releases that allowed them to win over viewers and give them that hard-to-define classic status, putting them in a pantheon that includes the likes of “Miracle on 34th Street” and “Home Alone.” What are the chances that a new holiday film could join those ranks of those cherished comfort watches?
These days it’s rare to find a movie like “Love Actually” or “Elf” in theaters. The holiday-themed titles that land on the big screen tend to be violent — aimed at audiences that can handle a little gore with their mistletoe. Last year, David Harbour played Santa as a John Wick-style killer in “Violent Night.” On Dec. 1, the bloody revenge tale “Silent Night” arrives from action filmmaker John Woo. It’s also billed as from “the producer of ‘John Wick.’” When did Christmas get so vengeful?
The lighter fare, meanwhile, has migrated largely onto computer screens and televisions via streaming and cable. Some of the most insistent purveyors of material sweeter than eggnog are Hallmark, which spits out dozens of forgettable flicks every year, and Netflix, which has established what it calls a “Holiday Universe” that includes franchises like “The Princess Switch” with Vanessa Hudgens. Last year, one of its marquee titles was “Falling for Christmas,” featuring Lindsay Lohan in a snowy “Overboard” rip-off.
Even once bankable stars are putting their Christmas vehicles online. Amazon is set to release “Candy Cane Lane” in December. It stars Eddie Murphy in what was billed in a promotional email as his “first holiday film,” a distinction that seems to ignore “Trading Places.”
On the one hand, thanks to the churn at places like Hallmark and Lifetime, which will collectively release upward of 50 new holiday movies this year, it feels as if the genre is more robust than ever. On the other, the idea of getting a new film that’s as revered and rewatched 20 years on as “Elf” and “Love Actually” feels far-fetched.
For the somehow uninitiated: “Elf,” directed by Jon Favreau, charts the adventures of Ferrell’s jovial and naïve Buddy, a human who’s raised in the North Pole by Santa’s elves and who ventures to New York in search of his birth father, a cranky children’s book editor played by James Caan. The movie contains conscious throwbacks to Rankin/Bass animated Christmas specials, like “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” (1964), as well as cheeky jokes about New York City without ever getting too racy. (My favorite bit is when Buddy says, “I traveled through the seven levels of the candy cane forest, passed the sea of swirly twirly gumdrops, and then I walked through the Lincoln Tunnel.”)
Whereas “Elf” was rated PG, “Love Actually” drew an R; yet despite some nudity and cursing, it outdoes “Elf” in earnestness. The directorial debut of “Four Weddings and a Funeral” and “Notting Hill” scribe Richard Curtis, the movie weaves together the stories of lovestruck Londoners around the holidays. There’s Hugh Grant as the prime minister moony-eyed over one of his employees (Martine McCutcheon); Emma Thompson as the sad wife whose husband (Alan Rickman) is possibly straying; and Liam Neeson as the widower whose young stepson (Thomas Brodie-Sangster) has a big crush. The list goes on.
When the two films were initially released, neither saw the other as competition, according to “Elf” producer Todd Komarnicki and “Love Actually” producer Tim Bevan of Working Title Films.
“We were toe-to-toe battling with ‘Master and Commander,’” Komarnicki said, referring to the Peter Weir high-seas period drama starring Russell Crowe. He added, “For me, ‘Love Actually’ is just a movie that I really dug.” (Both holiday movies would land in the Top 20 highest grossing films worldwide for 2003, ahead of “Master and Commander.”)
And Bevan didn’t even think of “Love Actually” as a Christmas movie. “You sort of knew that it was Christmas-y because of the songs and all the rest of it,” he said. “But it felt like a romantic comedy rather than a Christmas movie.”
Instead, he viewed “Love Actually” as a follow-up to the successes of “Four Weddings and a Funeral” and “Notting Hill,” both of which contributed to the rise of the British rom-com as a bankable industry. To be clear, Bevan does understand why it’s so linked with Christmas.
“It’s about eight or nine different strands where there are different great emotions going on about love and family and all of the rest of it,” he said. “That’s the element that makes it Christmas-y.”
Christmas entertainment is, at this point, eternal, but looking back, the early 2000s were bursting with holiday spirit. After midcentury films like “It’s a Wonderful Life” and “Miracle on 34th Street” offered existential musings on the seasons, a wave of edgier new favorites emerged in the late ’80s and early ’90s. “National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation” and “Home Alone,” both written by John Hughes, offered Yuletide satires of the nuclear family with zany antics. “Elf” and “Love Actually,” meanwhile, each felt, in their own way, like optimistic responses to the Sept. 11 attacks, with reminders that cynicism can be overcome. But 2003 also saw the release of “Bad Santa,” a pioneer in the now common subgenre of the raunchy Christmas movie that includes “The Night Before” (2015) and “A Bad Moms Christmas” (2017).
It takes time, of course, for a movie to become a classic, which is why it’s easy to say definitively that “Elf” and “Love Actually” deserve that designation. “Probably a decade later you think, ‘Wow, people are still watching that movie at Christmas time,’” Bevan said of realizing “Love Actually” had become a perennial favorite.
And while there are certainly external factors that go into the popularity of both of these titles — including the fact that television programmers throw them on ad nauseam in the winter months — there has to be some unconscious collective decision that a movie deserves to be watched time and time again. Partly it’s that these films were emblematic of a certain communal experience when audiences gathered to watch them way back in 2003. “The sad thing is, had we made both of those movies for streamers today, I would argue we would not be having this conversation in 20 years’ time,” Bevan said.
While he and Kormanicki insisted their movies could get theatrical runs now, “Elf” and “Love Actually,” with their midbudget sensibilities, would probably feel like outliers in the current theatrical landscape. With a few exceptions — like 2019’s “Last Christmas,” based on the Wham! song — there doesn’t seem to be much of a home for holiday entertainment in theaters, unless it is somehow profane or bloody. Even Ferrell’s most recent attempt at Christmas fare, the 2022 Dickens-inspired musical “Spirited” with Ryan Reynolds, was made for Apple TV+, a streamer.
Streaming was ostensibly supposed to make movies more accessible, but instead it just makes them feel more disposable. And that’s not to say the streamers haven’t released some genuinely engaging Christmas material among the heaps of dreck, like the visually inventive Netflix animated feature “Klaus” (2019) or Hulu’s queer rom-com, “Happiest Season” (2020), starring Kristen Stewart. Still, the holidays thrive on nostalgia, and it’s hard to be nostalgic for the latest Vanessa Hudgens princess movie you watched while simultaneously scrolling through your Instagram feed.
If I’m being honest, in the past 20 years I’ve had “Elf” and “Love Actually” playing in the background countless times while I putter around or hang out with family, but that’s largely because I know them both nearly by heart. My mother typically demands a joint viewing of “Love Actually” at some point every year. And yet the reason I have such affection for it is because each subsequent viewing reminds me of a previous one, which in turn makes me think back to when I watched it for the first time in the basement of a multiplex in 2003.
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