Famously, the movie was released so early in the "Christmas season" (October 22nd) and performed so poorly at the box office ($15 million worldwide gross) that they released it on video in time for that very Christmas, to recoup any little bit of their $45 million investment. And that was in an era when the window between theatrical release and home viewing release was as wide as it has ever been. Releasing a movie on video a mere two months after the theater -- when theaters would, ideally, still be playing it -- was unheard of.
But times have changed, and in retrospect, there seems to be a certain brilliance to the move, even if it was born out of desperation. The drawback Christmas movies have always had is that they may do big business in the theater, but the home video market is likely to have significantly depleted profitability due to the fact that there is no point to release it there a mere three to four months after it was in cinemas. Because no one wants to watch a Christmas movie in February, you wait until the following year, at which point it's old hat -- or at least, no different than any other old movie a person chooses to rent or buy.
I have to think Surviving Christmas did make a little extra money on video just by virtue of being a "new" movie -- people always love the new -- and by being easily available at home when they still wanted to watch Christmas movie.
Nowadays, it was likely always the plan to release Red One on Amazon Prime in time for this Christmas, which they did last week -- even though they released it only a month before that in cinemas. That's in spite of how well it did in theaters, which was reasonably well: $175 million globally. That's nothing compared to a budget of -- am I reading this right? -- $250 million, so yes, it's not a hit, though it's more of a hit (percentage-wise) than Surviving Christmas was. Obviously not what they were hoping for, but it's not going to tank the studio or anything.
I had resigned myself to missing Red One. Not with a huge amount of regret, but I do like to watch a new Christmas movie or two each year, and not just limit myself to the pap and dreck that's released on streaming. (That's an oversimplification, as some of the Christmas movies I've enjoyed most in the past ten years -- Klaus, Spirited and Jingle Jangle -- all went straight to streaming.) It was easy to see that Red One would lose out in a crowded field of awards contenders when vying for my limited viewing time.
But then the other weekend, I took my younger son to the theater to see Moana 2 as part of a birthday party for one of his friends. He was looking at one of the trailers playing in the lobby for Red One, with a certain knowledge of its existence and essential details that could have only come from interest (or watching something about it on YouTube). That was when I experienced a small amount of regret, as it could have been a way for us to usher in a Christmas season that has been slow to get started, in part because we are going overseas tomorrow, and therefore have not gotten our own tree or done much in the way of decorating.
Then all the sudden, there it was, available for streaming.
And I felt just like the Surviving Christmas viewers of 2004 must have felt, only with significantly more optimism.
I had hoped to watch it with my ten-year-old on Saturday, but we are also building a deck -- don't ask -- and my wife was concerned about a preplanned engagement to watch the movie cutting short our deck time. However, it was clear we were ahead of our pace, so she happily approved the potential viewing. Only when I put it to my son, offering him either Saturday or Monday as possible dates, he opted for the Monday -- a small, but ultimately unimportant, setback.
I did watch it with him on Monday, on the hottest day of the year so far, when we were cocooned inside our air conditioned living room, feeling almost as cold as the polar climates depicted in the movie.
I think he might have slightly preferred not to watch it, since kids have short attention spans these days, and the video games he would have otherwise been playing are more natural fits for that. The evidence of this was that at one point during the movie, he had to get up and "twirl around" behind our couch for a few minutes. Yes, he's prone to being antsy, but it doesn't mean he's not enjoying or doesn't have the patience for the activity in question. He might even do it during the brevity of a Simpsons episode.
But he hasn't yet turned 11 -- that's just a few weeks off -- so I still have him as a captive audience for another year or two, as a kid who would rather make his dad happy if all it takes is spending a little bit of his unlimited fungible free time. This time next year, it might already be that much harder to watch Red One.
And in the end, the movie was not a huge hit with him. He called it "alright," then tried to hastily upgrade his assessment when he saw my surprise at his middling level of approbation. (It turns out, his reaction to the movie was more in line with the general outlook than my own.) Probably two hours and three minutes is too long for this movie, but not when you consider how absolutely bursting with ideas it is -- both good and not so good.
Me? I had cause for my optimism. I ended up giving it a 7/10 in my just-posted review on ReelGood, and I'd be lying if I said there weren't moments when I flirted with an 8. Clearer heads prevailed, and by the time I actually wrote the review, I realized the things I had to say were more in line with a 7.
But a 7 can be a pretty positive review, and it's way better than the half-star (out of five) I would have given Surviving Christmas if I'd been in charge of the star rating on the old site where I reviewed it. (In a now strange-seeming procedural move, some editor at the site gave a film a star rating based on available consensus, and it didn't matter if what you wrote was relatively out of sync with it.) (I just went to my old review site, AllMovie, to check to see what the star rating was, and this is how I discovered the fairly momentous news that the writing we all did back then appears to have been largely scrubbed from the site, replaced by a Wikipedia plot synopsis and a place for people to add their own reviews. This would be an even bigger deal if I hadn't printed out all my reviews at the time, though I must admit that this is a thought-provoking turn of events for me as a critic that may require its own separate post at some point. For what it's worth, the current star rating for Surviving Christmas is a quite-laughable three stars out of five.)
In any case, since this is a time of year for Christmas movie recommendations, I can give you one for Red One. It doesn't have any chance of entering the canon of classic Christmas movies, but it's a lot better than the average pap and dreck released directly to streaming -- and not only because it has that desirable imprimatur of having gotten released on the big screen just a month ago.
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