Movies

From A Christmas Prince to Princess Switch: How Netflix recreated cheesy festive films


Let’s be honest for a second – perfect Christmas movies are like good pizza, the cheesier the better.

Whether it’s Hugh Grant and Martine McCutcheon sharing a not-so-secret kiss in Love Actually, or Arnold Schwarzenegger running all over town in Jingle All The Way, just to get his kid a Turbo Man toy, the cheese gives you pure joy.

Well, Netflix has taken that cheesiness and run for the hills with it over the last few years, and we need to thank them.

The streaming service clearly saw a Santa-sized gap in the market and got to work on some epic originals. It all started with cult classic A Christmas Prince. Yes, we’re going so far as to lump the festive movie in with the likes of Pulp Fiction, Reservoir Dogs and Donnie Darko – maybe just the more upbeat end of that list.

ACP came out back in 2017, and the so-bad-it’s-epic tale of a journalist who gets sent abroad to get the story on a secretive prince as he prepares to be named king was all anyone on social media could talk about .

It sounds like eye-rolling fodder but something about watching Amber (Rose McIver) and Prince Richard (Ben Lamb) falling in love (spoiler alert, sorry) ignited something in all of us, and left us crying out for more. And Netflix was more than happy to deliver, blessing us with two sequels – The Royal Wedding and The Royal Baby – and hopefully countless more on the way.

A Christmas Prince came out in 2017 (Picture: Netflix)

Last year saw Vanessa Hudgens getting in on the action, giving us a festive reboot of The Parent Trap that precisely no one asked for but all of us enjoyed every second of. The Princess Switch sees a wannabe princess trading lives with an amateur baker who has flown into town for a festive baking competition? Honestly, what more could you need?

Beside the more ‘traditional’ movies, Netflix is packed with a whole variety of original films, ready for every taste and mood. They don’t patronise the viewer, they let us in on the joke and gift us with Easter eggs that somehow link every film. Okay, they’re not all instant hits, with The Holiday Calendar definitely not making anyone’s Top 10 lists any time soon, and Holiday In The Wild was actually surprisingly hard to get through, despite all the adorable elephants (and Rob Lowe).

But with more choice and freedom than ever over what to watch, Netflix is at least giving us options instead of forcing us to switch between watching The Holiday, Love Actually and Elf for the thousandth time.

We dare you not to grin through The Princess Switch (Picture: Netflix)

Over the few years alone we’ve been blessed with the critically acclaimed Klaus, Christmas Inheritance, The Christmas Chronicles, Let It Snow, and so much more, and this year we get double Hudgens, with The Princess Switch sequel (with a secret triplet, apparently) and The Knight Before Christmas, with a knight who is transported from the 1300s to present day to fulfil a quest. Yes, it’s completely unfeasible but we dare you not to grin like an idiot the whole way through.

And isn’t that the point of Christmas films? To make you feel all warm inside for 90 minutes, filled to the brim with the purest fluff? Not hours upon hours of trudging through a half-baked, hard to follow plot where you’re having to figure out if the main character is actually dead…

People might put their noses up at Netflix’s original Christmas films, but those behind some of the newer festive ‘classics’ could learn a lot from them all.



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