We love Hulu because it’s one of the best streaming services around. But this year’s Huludays Christmas movie lineup has a lot of bad films. Christmas with the Kranks, Jingle All of the Way, and I’ll Be Home For Christmas aren’t our idea of holiday standards. We shouldn’t let terrible movies get a pass just because they take place at Christmas.
The good news is that Hulu still has a handful of great Christmas movies that offset the lesser selections. Even the streamer’s new original film, Nutcrackers, falls under the festive season. For anyone who wants to share some holiday cheer with friends and family, or simply to have a good time on your own, these are the best Christmas movies on Hulu right now.
We’ve also put together guides to the best Christmas movies on Netflix and the best Christmas movies on Amazon Prime. After all, Hulu’s holiday selection is only so big.
After rarely taking acting roles in the last few years, Ben Stiller returns to headline Nutcrackers, Hulu’s latest original holiday flick. Mike Maxwell (Stiller) is a single guy who has to take responsibility for his four nephews following the deaths of his sister and her husband. The nephews — who are all played by real-life brothers Homer, Ulysses, Atlas, and Arlo Janson — are pretty wild to deal with. Few foster families are willing to take them, and Mike can’t have these kids complicating his own life any more than they already have. But it’s Christmastime, and Mike can’t help feeling drawn to his newfound family. Plus, he’s pretty sweet on the boys’ social worker, Gretchen (Linda Cardellini).
The title of It’s a Wonderful Knife is clearly a play off of It’s a Wonderful Life. And like that Christmas classic, there’s some alternate world timeline things happening for the main character. In this case, Winnie Carruthers (Jane Widdop) wishes that she was never born one year after losing her best friend, Cara Evans (Hana Huggins), to a masked serial killer, the Angel.
In this new timeline, Winnie’s parents, David (Joel McHale) and Judy (Erin Boyes), don’t know who she is, and her younger brother, Jimmy (Aiden Howard), has already been killed by the Angel. Winnie thinks she knows the identity of the man under the Angel’s mask. But even if she can stop his reign of terror, Winnie may be stuck in a world that she doesn’t belong in.
We’ve been singing the virtues of Die Hard as a Christmas movie for years, so it would have been hypocritical to leave it off of this list now that this classic action flick has come home for the holidays. John McClane (Bruce Willis) doesn’t even live in Los Angeles, but he’s come cross-country to win back his estranged wife, Holly Gennaro-McClane (Bonnie Bedelia), during her company’s Christmas party at Nakatomi Plaza.
Alan Rickman’s Hans Gruber plays the Grinch in this holiday gathering when he takes Holly and all of the Nakatomi executives hostage alongside his heavily armed men. This forces John to play the lone action hero in a bid to save his wife and the hostages. And while John is extremely resourceful and lucky, even his luck can’t last forever.
At the time of its release, The Polar Express got a lot of flack for the uncanny valley in the faces of its leading characters. Those were the result of early CGI motion-capture performances. And yet it doesn’t matter, because two decades later, this adaptation of Chris Van Allsburg’s children’s novel has become a holiday classic.
Tom Hanks voices a lot of characters in this film, including the conductor of the Polar Express, a magical train that takes children to meet Santa Claus (Hanks). But first, a boy (Daryl Sabara) and a girl (Nona Gaye) have to help the Polar Express get past some complications along the way.
Jon Favreau’s Elf came out in 2003 and was a big hit at the time, and it remains a Christmas film like no other. Will Ferrell stars as Buddy, a human who was raised among elves at the North Pole after a mishap decades earlier The problem with Buddy is that he’s too much of a human to comfortably live among the elves, and too much of an elf for humans.
Buddy’s biological father, Walter Hobbs (James Caan), has no idea that he has a son. But when Santa (Ed Asner) tells Buddy that he could potentially redeem Walter from the Naughty List, Buddy travels to New York to meet the family that he never had. Buddy also leaves chaos in his wake because of his eccentric persona, which alienates Walter and may keep him from reconciling with his son.
The Griswolds are back in National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation, but you may not recognize the kids, Rusty (Johnny Galecki) and Audrey (Juliette Lewis), as they were recast for this film. Nevertheless, the early Vacation movies were all about Clark Griswold (Chevy Chase) and his wife, Ellen (Violent Night‘s Beverly D’Angelo).
Clark’s heart is in the right place as he tries to make Christmas a special occasion for the family. However, Clark’s finances are squeezed by his miserly boss, Frank Shirley (Brian Doyle-Murray), and he’s also stressed out by the unexpected arrival of Ellen’s cousin-in-law, Eddie Johnson (Randy Quaid) and his wife and kids. Clark tries to put a happy face on everything, but even he can only take so much before he snaps.
The original Miracle on 34th Street is also on Hulu this holiday season, but the 1994 remake is charming in its own ways. Richard Attenborough stars as Kris Kringle, a man who berates a drunken Cole Department Store Santa shortly before that man disgraces himself in public. Dorey Walker (Elizabeth Perkins) hires Kris to replace the bad Santa, and he does a phenomenal job. The problem is that Kris seems to really believe that he is Santa.
Dorey becomes further disturbed when her daughter, Susan (Mara Wilson), also comes to believe that Kris is Santa. When a rival store gets Kris arrested, Dorey’s boyfriend, Bryan Bedford (Dylan McDermott), is forced to argue in court that Kris really is Santa.
Blair Marnell has been an entertainment journalist for over 15 years. His bylines have appeared in Wizard Magazine, Geek Monthly, SYFY Wire, Superhero Hype, Collider, DC Universe, and the official sites for Star Trek and Marvel. He also lends his pop culture expertise to Digital Trends on a variety of TV, movie, and streaming features.
Michael Bizzaco has been selling, installing, and talking about TVs, soundbars, streaming devices, and all things smart home for the better part of 15 years. He even knows a thing or two about how to fix this stuff when it starts misbehaving (because no tech is perfect!).
Mike has been writing for Digital Trends and several other publications since 2020. Fortunately, he’s still able to write after he got his index finger stuck in a vending machine at the Ramada Inn the summer before fourth grade! From hands-on reviews to best-of roundups, Mike does his best to share his expertise in a friendly and informative way with all readers, and loves staying on top of the latest AV and smart home trends.
When he’s not thanking his father for dislodging his finger from that vile vending machine in New Jersey, Mike enjoys playing guitar, reading, and indulging in horror films with his girlfriend.
Nick Perry is a freelance writer who bounced from Hollywood to Silicon Beach to pajama pants. His work has been featured on Digital Trends, Good Morning America, Entrepreneur, Mashable, and more media outlets.
Some of the best shots in Grok Imagine’s AI-made Odyssey don’t contain actors. Ancient landscapes stretch into the distance. Close-ups of grimy hands suggest people who have touched something rougher than a keyboard. For a few seconds, the illusion holds.
https://twitter.com/imagine/status/2113712964419063911
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