Thanks to increased competition, rising subscription costs and a maddening policy of cancelling shows right at the moment they start to get good, Netflix isn't the cultural behemoth it once was. However, the good news is that we are now approaching Christmas, the time of year where Netflix gets to roll up its sleeves and show everyone its muscles. Which is another way of saying that it has just made a movie about a woman who wants to have sex with a snowman.
Hot Frosty - for that is the film's name - is the story of Cathy (Lacey Chabert), a woman who is starting to emerge from grief after the death of her husband. As per the trailer, one day she is walking home when she sees an incredibly buff snowman with a six-pack and meticulously modelled nipples. Taken by the majesty of this weirdly sexy snowman, she drapes her scarf across it and it comes to life. And now he isn't just a sexy snowman, he's a sexy naked human with limited intelligence. And Cathy is into it. The tagline to Hot Frosty isn't "This Christmas, forget about your dead husband by having it off with some snow," but it probably should be.
Do you see what I mean, though? Nowhere but Netflix would even think about making a Christmas film about a woman who regains her passion for life by ogling a snowman. The Christmas movie business is by and large in the toilet. Films like this, at the lower end of the budget, are all so identical that they're no longer really fit for purpose.
Thanks to Hallmark's decision to churn out dozens of dirt-cheap Christmas movies every year, you don't even need to watch one any more to know that the vast majority of them are about hard-nosed big city career women who return to their sleepy home town for Christmas and find themselves falling for the simple charms of a local man, played by the closest thing Hallmark can get to a labrador in a plaid shirt. There are millions of these films. Billions. Entire generations have grown up watching them, to the point that they now unconsciously equate Christmas with the notion that female ambition is wrong.
The bigger budget films are even worse. This year's Christmas tentpole is Amazon's Red One, which looks dismal. The premise (The Rock rescues Santa) is bad. The production (delayed and wildly over budget thanks reportedly in part to The Rock turning up eight hours late repeatedly) sounds cursed. The trailer is a cavalcade of lazy "Well that just happened" quipping. If Red One is the future of Christmas movies, count me out.
But perhaps it isn't the future of Christmas movies. Hot Frosty is a film about a woman bonking a snowman. It doesn't look good on paper, and it might not even look good on a screen, but it has somehow captured the public imagination like no Christmas film in living memory. Nobody expects it to be a masterpiece, but everyone seems to have entered into it with such a loosey-goosey "anything goes" spirit that it just seems irresistible. The entire purpose of Hot Frosty is to exceed your low expectations, and isn't that what all Christmas movies do?
You sense that Netflix has been building up to Hot Frosty for a while. As far back as 2015 it was playing with the form by making a Bill Murray Christmas special, and its Princess Switch trilogy (a cross between The Princess Diaries and The Parent Trap) seems to delight in weighing itself down in more madcap lore than it can possibly handle. It has movies about Heather Graham spending Christmas with her frenemy, Christmas films where Lindsay Lohan loses her memory in a skiing accident, a Mexican film called Grumpy Christmas. And, let's not forget, in Klaus it made one of the best animated Christmas movies of all time.
Netflix has been so consistent at putting out Christmas content, and gently nudging at the peripheries of what a Christmas movie can be, that you could be forgiven for thinking that it had already made a festive film for everyone. However, one demographic remained untended: horny little weirdos who want to see Lacey Chabert get steamy with a sexy snowman. Thanks to Hot Frosty, that gap has now been filled. Congratulations Netflix, and any time you'd like a script about a reindeer with an unnaturally large penis, please get in touch.