It’s beginning to feel a lot like Christmas, especially on streaming services. Every year, a stuffed stocking’s worth of peppermint-sweet holiday flicks roll off the assembly line and onto your television (and occasionally theaters). Most are straight-up bad, some are so-bad-they’re-good, and a select few are genuinely good – or at least, self-aware enough to make for a fun night gathered ‘round the glow of the TV set. Rarer still are those which become legit viral phenomenons. In 2024, that was Hot Frosty, Netflix’s winking winter romcom about a hunky snowman come to life. Are there any films from this year’s slate that might attain the same status? We’ve perused the cream of the 2025 yuletide crop, and ranked them by their chances to get as hot as Frosty.
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Tyler Perry's Finding Joy (Prime Video)
Ideal for: Tyler Perry completists
Tyler Perry presents Misery as a romcom? In the indefatigable writer-director-producer’s latest, Shannon Thornton is a New York fashion designer dissatisfied with her career trajectory who follows her crush to Colorado, only to wind up skidding off an icy road where she’s rescued by an improbably handsome hermit, played by Tosin Morohunfola. Will this rugged mountain man teach her to appreciate the things that truly matter in life? No spoilers!
Frosty rating: ⛄
Watch Tyler Perry’s Finding Joy now on Prime Video
The Family Plan 2 (Apple TV)
Ideal for: extremely forgiving action-comedy aficionados; your dad
Ah yes, the sequel to 2023’s The Family Plan, which everyone definitely loves and remembers! If you somehow need a refresher, Mark Wahlberg is a retired CIA assassin turned suburban dad who just can’t seem to outrun his past. In this holiday-themed followup, Wahlberg takes his wife (Michelle Monaghan) and kids on a European vacation for Christmas and secretly accepts ‘one last job’ to help fund it. Hilarity ensues, theoretically.
Frosty rating: ⛄⛄
Watch The Family Plan 2 on Apple TV starting Nov 21
The Night My Dad Saved Christmas 2 (Netflix)
Ideal for: dads and sons doing Duolingo together
Most folks are lucky to get a chance to save Christmas once in a lifetime. But twice? In this sequel to the 2023 Spanish-language original, a father and son are tasked with rescuing Santa from the clutches of an evil toy company executive. Sounds better than another Santa Clause movie, to be honest.
Frosty rating: ⛄⛄
Watch The Night My Dad Saved Christmas 2 on Netflix starting Dec 6
Silent Night, Deadly Night (cinemas)
Ideal for: Shudder subscribers forced to hide their Art the Clown tattoos at grandma’s house
The original 1984 slasher is the Citizen Kane of killer Santa movies, while the cash-grab sequel produced one of the all-time movie memes. (Say it with me: ‘Garbage Day!’) A remake would seem like sacrilege if it hadn’t already happened once before, and the early reviews suggest it gives the intended audience exactly what it wants: gore, campy fun and a guy in a department-store St Nick outfit swinging an axe.
Watch Silent Night, Deadly Night in cinemas starting Dec 12
Frosty rating: ⛄⛄
Champagne Problems (Netflix)
Ideal for: people who watch Emily in Paris unironically
Netflix already had the market on American-in-Paris romances, and here’s another one. Friday Night Lights’ Minka Kelly is a striving executive sent to the City of Lights to seal the deal with a high-end champagne brand for her employer, who ends up having a tryst with the vineyard owner’s handsome son (Tom Wozniczka). Swifties, don’t be duped by the title into thinking Taylor has something to do with the movie.
Frosty rating: ⛄⛄
Watch Champagne Problems now on Netflix
A Very Jonas Christmas Movie (Disney+)
Ideal for: pre-teens, nostalgic thirtysomethings, late-40s divorcees
Pop music’s favorite virgins – spiritually, if no longer literally – play barely fictionalised versions of themselves embarking on a Planes, Trains and Automobiles-esque odyssey to get home for Christmas, battling exploding airplanes, wolves and Kenny G along the way.
Frosty rating: ⛄⛄⛄
Watch A Very Jonas Christmas Movie now on Disney+
Jingle Bell Heist (Netflix)
Ideal for: distracted viewing
Sex Education’s Connor Swindells and Disney Channel alum Olivia Holt are petty thieves who team up to rob one of London’s largest department stores on Christmas Eve – and potentially steal each other’s hearts as well. Honestly, it looks like the sort of Netflix movie that’s fun to partially pay attention to while gift shopping on Amazon.
Frosty rating: ⛄⛄ ⛄
Watch Jingle Bell Heist on Netflix starting Nov 26
Christmas Karma (cinemas)
Ideal for: fans of musicals; karma chameleons
Otherwise known as ‘yet another Christmas Carol adaptation.’ Director Gurinder Chadha (Bend It Like Beckham) puts a Bollywood spin on the Dickens classic, with Kunal Nayyar as a prickly entrepreneur who’s visited by three ghosts on Christmas Eve, played by Eva Longoria, Billy Porter and – wait for it – Boy George. Interesting casting, if nothing else.
Frosty rating: ⛄⛄⛄
Watch Christmas Karma now in UK cinemas
Merchants of Joy (Prime Video)
Ideal for: arborists
Considering most New Yorkers pay $3,000 per month to live in a space the size of a supply closet, you wouldn’t think the city would have a hugely competitive market for Christmas trees, but apparently the industry is pretty cutthroat. This documentary spotlights the colorful cast of characters who lord over the Big Apple pine business as they jostle for street corners and high sales.
Frosty rating: ⛄⛄⛄
Watch Merchants of Joy on Prime Video starting Dec 1
A Merry Little Ex-Mas (Netflix)
Ideal for: ’90s Aerosmith fans; your mom
With Lindsay Lohan experiencing a kinda-sorta mainstream career renaissance, Alicia Silverstone steps up as this season’s ‘beloved actor who’s sort of disappeared now reborn as a Netflix Christmas diva.’ Here, she’s one-half of a newly divorced couple who stubbornly believe they can still celebrate the holidays together as a family unit without making things deeply uncomfortable for everyone else. Jameela Jamil and Pierson Fodé co-star as the respective much-younger dates they bring to dinner to make the other jealous.
Frosty rating: ⛄⛄⛄⛄
Watch A Merry Little Ex-Mas now on Netflix
My Secret Santa (Netflix)
Ideal for: watching along with four to five strong eggnogs
Every holiday season needs one streaming movie with a truly insane premise, and this seems to be the one for 2025. In desperate need of a job — and to give her daughter half-priced snowboarding lessons — a single mother (Alexandra Breckenridge) pulls a She’s the Man, disguising herself as a jolly fat guy to land a gig portraying Santa at a ski resort. But the ruse is complicated when the manager spots her out of costume and falls in love. D’oh ho ho!
Frosty rating: ⛄⛄⛄⛄
Watch My Secret Santa on Netflix starting Dec 12
Oh. What. Fun. (Prime Video)
Ideal for: sarcastic Gen Xers who secretly love The Holiday
Directed by Wet Hot American Summer’s Michael Showalter, with a cast that includes Chloë Grace Moretz, Dominic Sessa, Jason Schwartzman and Michelle freakin’ Pfeiffer? Could this actually be… good? Pfeiffer is an overworked, underappreciated mother who ditches her family at the holidays to participate in a televised ‘Holiday Mom Contest’. Sounds cheesy as anything on here, but Showalter, who also directed the 2024 Coachella rom-com The Idea of You, has shown an ability to wring genuine emotion from the corniest setups.
Frosty rating: ⛄⛄⛄⛄
Watch Oh. What. Fun. on Prime Video starting Dec 3