Christmas movies are wonderful, but who said they’re the only thing you’re allowed to watch on or around Christmas? Sometimes, at the end of a long day of festivities, you’re looking for something totally different than the movies you’ve been watching for the previous month.
If that’s the case for you, then we’ve pulled together a list of movies on Hulu that might fit the bill. And yes, a couple of them are set on Christmas, but they are not movies that put Christmas at the forefront of their storytelling. Here are five Hulu movies worth watching on Christmas.
We also have guides to the best movies on Amazon Prime Video, the best movies on Netflix, the best movies on Hulu, the best movies on Max, and the best movies on Disney+.
One of the most underrated movies of 2024, and one that will leave you with a smile on your face, Thelma stars June Squibb as an elderly woman who loses $10,000 in a telephone scam and then teams up with a friend to get her money back.
Squibb remains one of the most remarkably charismatic actors alive, and Thelma is one of the great showcases for her talents. It’s also a reminder of the many ways elderly people are vulnerable to a society that seems hellbent on taking them for everything their worth.
You can watch Thelma on Hulu.
If you’re looking for something a little more conventionally Christmas-y, Die Hard is a good bet. The movie, which is hotly debated every year for its Christmas credentials, is undeniably set in the immediate aftermath of a holiday party.
Following a New York cop who gets trapped in an L.A. skyscraper after trying to salvage his marriage, Die Hard is basically just one brilliant, extended-action set piece. It’s carried in large part by Bruce Willis and Alan Rickman, two performers who know how to make the most of their charisma during every moment they get on screen.
You can watch Die Hard on Hulu.
Another movie that is set during Christmas but is not often thought of as a typical Christmas film, 2021’s Spencer tells the story of Princess Diana during a visit to her in-laws for the holidays. Of course, for Diana, those in-laws arethe British royal family, and she’s forced to reckon with their pretense even as she also wrestles with personal demons of her own. Kristen Stewart is the magnetic center of Spencer, and her performance as the people’s princess is a reminder of just how much pain she was put through.
You can watch Spencer on Hulu.
If you missed one of the best movies of 2023, now is the perfect time to catch up with it. All of Us Strangers follows a screenwriter who lives in a nearly empty apartment building and begins revisiting his childhood home. While there, he reunites with his parents, who both died while he was still quite young.
The movie is wistful and sad, featuring a genuinely heartbreaking performance from Andrew Scott as a man just trying to reconnect with the feelings he had when he was a kid and understand his parents just a little bit better.
You can watch All of Us Strangers on Hulu.
Look, if you’re looking for something wholesome to watch on Christmas, this is not the movie for you. If you’d like something a little messed up, you might enjoy The Fly. The movie tells the story of a scientist who discovers how to teleport living things.
When a fly gets caught in the machine with him, though, he slowly undergoes a hideous, remarkable transformation that has to be seen to be believed. The Fly is really, really gross, but it’s also a romantic tragedy featuring excellent performances from Geena Davis and Jeff Goldblum.
China just gave Hollywood a cautionary tale about AI filmmaking. Sanxingdui: Future Past, billed as the country's first fully AI-generated movie, hit theaters on October 23 and bombed at the box office.
According to Futurism, the film's reported $1.5 million production budget landed on more than 10,000 screens. Yet it pulled in only about $181,000, averaging roughly $20 per screen, making the budget difficult to recover.
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
YouTube videos could soon look better without eating quite so much data, right? Thankfully, the platform plans to introduce a new video format called AV2 on its web player in early 2027, promising more efficient streaming and potentially fewer playback hiccups on slower internet connections. The big headline is a roughly 30% improvement in compression efficiency over AV1, YouTube's existing video format. That doesn't guarantee every video will use 30% less data, but it could make streaming a little easier on both internet connections and data allowances.
What is AV2, and why should viewers care?