HBO Max 2020 Christmas Movies and Shows: A Guide To Get You In The Christmas Spirit

You wouldn’t think that you could make an entire Christmas movie as a riff on an underappreciated holiday song by Wham!, but that’s why you’re not Paul Feig and Emma Thompson. The director of Bridesmaids and the Academy Award-winning star of Love, Actually (which, it should be noted, was not where she won her Academy Award) teamed up to create this lovely little Christmas rom-com with a twist worthy of M. Night Shyamalan.

Game of Thrones’ Emilia Clarke and Crazy Rich Asians star Henry Golding star as would-be lovers who have a series of magical interactions after they meet by chance in London. Clarke’s Kate is a depressed young woman who finds her life changed for the better by Golding’s Tom… in ways she doesn’t fully understand yet.

Watch Last Christmas on HBO Max

You’d be hard-pressed to find a more essential Christmas story than Dickens’ three-ghosts-in-the-night tale, and why settle for a modern adaptation when this utter classic is available? A staple of television replays for decades, the MGM production stars Reginald Owen as the miserly Ebenezer Scrooge, the original Christmas curmudgeon who changes his ways after being visited by the spirits of Christmases past, present and future.

Some of the scarier or more depressing elements of Dickens’ original (and the many other more recent adaptations of the story) have been ironed over in this version, making it a great choice for younger viewers—not to mention the brisk 70-minute runtime.

Watch A Christmas Carol (1938) on HBO Max

If you don’t limit yourself to movies that are explicitly about Christmas, a whole world of holiday-adjacent possibilities open up, and HBO Max’s depth of classic cinema offerings really shines in that regard. Take, for instance, this 1947 comedy, the bulk of which takes place around Christmas. That’s why Aloysius McKeever, a sly hobo, takes up his annual residence as a squatter in an opulent Manhattan mansion while its mega-rich owner is out of town for the holidays. He invites in a cast of fellow down-on-their-luck characters, unaware that one is the magnate homeowner’s runaway daughter. Classic hijinks ensue, with the story culminating at a Christmas Eve dinner that will change many of their lives.

Watch It Happened On Fifth Avenue on HBO Max

A shopkeeper verbally spars with a woman he’s professionally acquainted with, while maintaining an anonymous flirtation with a mystery correspondence—only to realize, much to his chagrin, that the two women are one and the same. Sound familiar? That’s because it’s the plot of the Tom Hanks/Meg Ryan rom-com smash You’ve Got Mail, not to mention the Broadway musical She Loves Me — both of which were adapted from this beloved 1940 Jimmy Stewart vehicle, much of which takes place around Christmas.

Stewart stars as Alfred Kralik, a leathergoods salesman in Budapest, and Margaret Sullavan as his foil and love interest Klara Novak. It’s classic Stewart, and a widely-beloved piece of cinema history. If you loved the later versions, you’ll adore the original.

Watch The Shop Around The Corner on HBO Max

It might feel like a bit of a stretch to include this 1944 musical Judy Garland vehicle, which takes place over the course of an entire year in the life of a St. Louis family, but there’s one critical piece of information that more than justifies its inclusion on the list here. Among a number of classic musical standards introduced in the film, it marked the debut of the song “Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas,” and few explicitly-Christmas movies could claim half as much impact on the pop culture of the season.

And, aside from that? It’s a delightful film! A tumultuous year in the Smith family culminates in the 1904 World’s Fair, and we should all be so lucky as to see a large, safely-held public gathering as the end to our own Christmas story.

Watch Meet Me In St. Louis on HBO Max

Okay, too many oldies in a row for you? Let’s take a hard left turn here and try out something different: a Christmas slasher! This is the second remake of a 1974 horror film, and it centers around a group of sorority sisters at fictional Hawthorne College trying to escape the clutches of a mysterious killer. The 1970s story is modernized to address campus rape culture and the push to reconcile with the problematic histories of many college’s founders and namesakes, but at its heart, it’s a classic slasher, just sometimes with an icicle in place of a machete.

Watch Black Christmas (2019) on HBO Max

Maybe a film about talking puppies saving Christmas appeals conceptually to you; maybe it doesn’t. But what I can tell you definitively as a parent of small children is, this movie—the fourth Air Buddies film and ninth overall in the Air Bud canon—is a HUGE hit with the under-five set.

I’m not even sure the plot really matters here: just know that there’s a dog named Santa Paws that’s voiced by Tom Bosley and the puppies have to save Christmas and this is an hour and a half long movie that you can confidently plant your children in front of while you wrap presents without them noticing because it’s 2020 and the safest babysitter is your preferred streaming device. Trust me: I speak from experience on this one.

Watch Santa Buddies on HBO Max

A motley crew and a madcap plot form the basis of this underappreciated 2006 comedy, featuring a strong cast of mostly-unknown young actors. On Christmas Eve, the fictional Hoover Airport in Washington DC is snowed in by a blizzard, grounding all flights—including those of a half-dozen unaccompanied minors, who are corralled into the “Unaccompanied Minors Room” by airport staff.

Aside from the general bummer of spending the holiday in an airport lounge, there’s a bigger problem: older brother Spencer realizes that his still-believing sister Katherine’s faith in Santa Claus if she doesn’t get a present while they’re stuck in the airport, and he enlists the ragtag crew of youths in a caper to save her holiday.

Watch Unaccompanied Minors on HBO Max

To be honest, this mostly-overlooked 2013 indie comedy about a pair of mismatched conmen and former accomplices-turned Christmas-tree salesmen is somewhat uneven in its pacing and plotting, but the cast is reason enough to give it a chance. The always-excellent Paul Giamatti and ageless-and-lovable Paul Rudd co-star in the dark comedy, and you can’t really go wrong when either of these national treasures are involved, let alone both.

Watch All Is Bright on HBO Max

There’s nothing that says “Christmas movie” more than a “what-might-have-been” out-of-body experience, but this isn’t It’s A Wonderful Life and that’s not Jimmy Stewart. No, even better, it’s Nicolas Cage, playing a wealthy Wall Street executive who ends up in a vision of the modest suburban bliss his life might’ve been, if only he hadn’t put career first more than a decade ago and left behind his relationship with Kate (Tea Leoni).

The story takes place mostly on Christmas, and that’s all the excuse you should need to welcome more Nicolas Cage into your holiday season.

Watch The Family Man on HBO Max

Is it a Christmas movie, or just a movie that happens at Christmastime? That’s a question that could apply to many of the films that we’ve listed here, but we’d be remiss if we didn’t talk about the apotheosis of this question, the blockbuster action movie classic that redefined the genre and introduced us to the phrase “Ho Ho Ho, now I have a machine gun!” Bruce Willis makes his first appearance as grizzled New York cop John McClane, accidentally invited to his estranged wife Holly’s Christmas party at Los Angeles’s Nakatomi Tower on the night German terrorists seize the building in a brazen robbery attempt.

Is it a Christmas movie? It’s going to be as endless a source of internet debates as the question of whether or not a hot dog is a sandwich, but ultimately? Who cares? It’s a great film that’s endlessly rewatchable and it happens to take place at the most wonderful time of the year. Take off your socks and make fists with your toes. It’s Christmas.

Watch Die Hard on HBO Max