December 17, 2025 • 20 mins
On this episode of Our American Stories, every winter, the same question makes its rounds: Is Die Hard a Christmas movie? It premiered in the heat of July, packed with explosions instead of sleigh bells, but something strange happened once audiences got hold of it. The film began drifting toward December as if it had been invited all along. Stephen Follows walks us through that slow migration, pulling together the data, the patterns, and the odd cultural habits that turned a barefooted cop into holiday comfort viewing.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:15):
And we continue with our American stories, and we all
have our favorite movies to cuddle up with at Christmas time,
from It's a Wonderful Life a Miracle on thirty Fourth Street.
But for many people, Diehard is one such film that
makes the festive playlist. But is it actually a Christmas move?
Here to settle this question once and for all, is
(00:35):
Stephen Followed. Stephen is an established data researcher in the
film industry and wrote the widely circulated answer to this
hotly debated question on his website Stephenfollows dot com. Here's
Stephen with the story of how he came up with
a definitive answer.
Speaker 2 (00:54):
Hi, my name is Stephen Follows, and I am a
film data analyst. Every week I do a new bit
of research into the film industry. And sometimes it's sort
of very crunchy, and other times it's kind of lighter
and fun. And you know, we've tested different types of
popcorn in different theater chains and discovered who's got the
same supplier, and you know, all sorts of fun, interesting,
(01:16):
strange things. And so a few years ago I was
talking to some students and I was trying to get
them to engage with the idea of what a movie is,
and in doing so I stumbled upon an argument that
I did not expect to be quite as visceral as
it turned out to be. I asked them whether they
(01:38):
thought die Hard was a Christmas movie or not. That's it,
that's the question. That was the simple question that I
asked them, and I thought it would be a quick
entry point, and honestly, it took the entire day because
there was about thirty students and they all studied through
(02:00):
growing in questions and obviously it is a Christmas movie.
Obviously it's not a Christmas movie, And so I ended
up splitting them into different groups. They did different bits
of research, and at the end of that day we
had a fairly satisfying answer. And so then I went home,
and that next week I did some more data research.
I got a bit further into it, and I wrote
it up as a blog article, thinking, okay, well, this
(02:21):
is a fun exploration of movies and a nice thing
to do at Christmas. Since then, the question has become
a bigger and bigger cultural moment, and also my article,
which I think is the one that people I don't
think anyone's got into more detail than I have. That's
not necessarily a good thing for me, but certainly I
(02:41):
think I have the most comprehensive data exploration of the question.
And so that's what I wanted to share with you
today was what I did to try and answer this
question and what the data tells us. And then at
the end we can properly answer is die Hard a
Christmas movie or not? So the first thing to clear
up is what is die Well. I'm not going to
go into too much detail, but essentially it is an
(03:03):
action thriller from nineteen eighty eight, which I highly recommend.
It's a terrific film Christmas or no, and it's about
a grizzled New York cop becomes a one man army
to take on a group of German bank Roberts who
are holding the CoP's wife and her unlucky colleagues hostage
in a high rise building. The film takes place at
Christmas and has Christmasy bits, but as we'll see, this
(03:25):
is right on the biting point of is it Christmasy enough?
But it certainly happens at Christmas and there's a Christmas
party in it. Interestingly, the plot of the movie comes
from a book called Nothing Lasts Forever, which is itself
a sequel to another book called The Detective. And in
nineteen sixty eight there was a movie adaptation of The
Detective starring Frank Sinatra.
Speaker 3 (03:47):
Still us a little juck, she.
Speaker 2 (03:49):
Used a pusher, she's an addict, and she's nineteen years
old as towns crawling with kids the same age, I'll
go on the same route, part of the Great Society.
So bizarrely, when the production team came to make die Hard,
they contractually had to offer the main role of die
Hard to a seventy three year old Frank Sinatra. Fortunately
for us, he turned it down, and so the role
(04:11):
of Johnmanclane went to Bruce Willis and it became one
of his defining action films, and argue you, one of
the defining action films of the genre. So loads of
people love die Hard. It's a very fun movie. It's
got great action, it's got some wit, some charm, it's
got some great set pieces, and all in all, it's
just one of those movies that really came together and
also helped define a genre because it was sort of
(04:32):
late eighties leading into the nineties of one of those
huge explosion, heavy action films, and it's just it's just
great fun, very kind of. It's also got Alan Rickman
doing a fantastic turn and loads of secretary characters that
are interesting. It's a fun watch. So let's start with creative.
(04:53):
If we go into the script and we just simply
have a look at how many times the word Christmas appears,
then it appears eight times in a script. Well is
that a lot? Is that not a lot? Let's compare
it to other words. So explode only appears four times,
die five times, hard eleven times, shoot twelve, kill thirteen,
(05:14):
blood thirteen, so that all of Christmas is more present
in the script in a text form than those words.
But there are words like gun, which appears seventy three
times in a script, terrorist fifty one times, which is
interesting on a couple of levels. One because of the
prevalence of it, but second of all, they're not terrorists.
Alan Rickman and his band are bank robbers. They're using
(05:35):
terrorism as they're sort of cover, but they're just propping
the bank. It's interesting how we even the script calls
the terrorists when they're not and then the word suddenly
appears forty five times, So we can say that Christmas
is definitely present, but it's not, you know, in text forms.
The most important thing. Interestingly, there is actually a reference
within it that's talking about run DMC's Christmas in the
Holliss whether that's Christmasy enough. So there is actually a
(05:57):
meta conversation in the movie. We will put that to
one side because I don't think we can go into
more detail. Right if we were some soones.
Speaker 1 (06:06):
Christmas music, we.
Speaker 2 (06:10):
Can look at the people who made the movie and
see what they think. So there's two writers credited on it,
and one of them is Stephen Desusa, and he was
quoted as saying, if die Hard is not a Christmas movie,
then White Christmas is not a Christmas movie, and he
pointed out that it takes place at Christmas, features a
Christmas party and the christ like sacrifice of John McClain
walking on broken glass. I would argue that's perhaps artistic license.
(06:34):
I'm not saying it's not true. It's just that is
a poetic reading of it. And if we want a
poetic reading of the other side of the argument, then
we only have to go to Bruce Willis, who said.
Speaker 3 (06:44):
Die Hard is not a Christmas movie, it's a Bruce
Willis movie.
Speaker 2 (06:56):
So I think both of those two balance each other
out because I don't think either of them using a
lot of evidence, but they're definitely expressing opinion from key
people involved. One of the nice things about doing research
around movies is that you get to watch a lot
of movies, and so I had to watch Diehard had
I got to watch Diehard again and again for this research.
And one of the things I did was I went
(07:17):
in and looked at all the Christmasy elements, so Santa
hats and Ho ho ho and Christmas trees and things
like that. I found twenty one distinct Christmas elements, which
is quite a lot. I can't do a visual analysis
of every movie released over the last thirty years. As
a comparison, I looked at the running time of all
movies over the last thirty years, and it would take
one million, three hundred and fifty six two hundred and
(07:40):
forty two hours to watch them, and my wife said,
I wasn't allowed to. One thing that we can do
in looking at the creative part of the movie is
to look at the songs that are in the movie,
and there are quite a lot of Christmasy songs. In
the movie. So in Diehard, we've got Christmas in the Hollies,
we've got Winter Wonderland, a whistled section of jingle bells,
and let It Snow is over the end credits. That's
(08:00):
a lot of Christmasy songs. I went back and did
some data research into the databases that are online around
songs in movies, and I found that Diehard is more
christmas Y music wise than ninety nine point two percent
of all movies released over the last thirty years, So
that's quite a lot. Most movies do not have Christmas
(08:23):
songs in them, and the ones that do only really
have one Christmas song in there, so that makes Diehard
a very Christmasy film just from a music perspective. Incidentally,
the most commonly used Christmas song in movies of the
last thirty years is jingle Bells, which is in about
a third of movies that have at least one Christmas song,
they feature jingle bells. And here is your bonus fact
(08:45):
trivia for today. Jingle Bells is not actually a Christmas
song and was meant to be about Thanksgiving, but over
time it's changed. So there is an interesting thing something
that we now think of as as Christmas, ey is
the most Christmasy you can imagine. It is the most
sighted Christmas song. Actually wasn't created as something that's Christmas Eve,
but culture has changed over the years.
Speaker 1 (09:06):
And you're listening to Stephen Follows telling the story of
how he and his class tried to answer the question
is die Hard a Christmas movie? I already think it's answered.
But what do you think when we come back more
from Stephen Follows here on our American stories, and we
(09:42):
continue with our American stories, and we're going to return
now to Stephen Follows, who is telling the story of
how he and his class tried to answer the question,
the burning question of the day, is Diehard a Christmas movie?
Let's return to Stephen scond.
Speaker 2 (10:00):
We could look at it as a piece of commerce.
It's a commercial product, right, there's an IP there, and
it's made by a major studio and is being sold commercially.
So we're focusing on it as a commercial product, you know,
to fuel catalyst industry, which is propelled by marketing and
responds to consumer demands. So one of the first questions
I asked, if someone says, yes, Diehard was definitely a
(10:22):
Christmas movie I say, well, when do Christmas movies come out?
People say in November and December, And by the way,
they're absolutely right. I did some data analysis and found
that almost every movies with Christmas in the title, about
fifty five percent come out in November, about thirty percent
come out in December, and most of the others come
out in October. So Christmas movies definitely come out around Christmas,
no shock there. But when did Diehard come out? Well,
(10:44):
it came out in July or February, depending on whether
you're where you are in the world, because it came
out in July eighty eight in America and February eighty
nine in the UK, so both very distinctly not Christmas
periods and very clearly not. So this sort of indicates
to us that the studio at the time did not
see this as a Christmas in movie. We can look
(11:06):
at how the movie was marketed to moviegoers as well.
So movies that are explicitly Christmas movies tend to have
a lot of very clear patterns to them. We'll see red,
we'll see green, we see Santa Hats, we see presents,
we see snow, we see Santa Claus, himself. You know,
there's lots of elements that are very very clearly Christmasy.
But if we look at the die Hard poster, we
(11:28):
just see two buildings with an explosion and John McClain's
face and some text that is not Christmasy. And then finally,
within the commercial intent, we can look at what the
tagline was, because the poster has lots of text and
certainly there is a huge amount of information on the poster.
(11:49):
So there were different posters and they had different taglines.
So if we first start by looking at Christmas movies,
Christmas movies tend to have taglines that are around Christmas.
So there's a horror film called Cramp and the tagline
is you better Watch out for Elf. It was this
holiday discover your Inner Elf. The Polar Express had this
(12:09):
holiday season, Believe National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation had You'll Crack Up,
which is a pun I rather enjoy. And then finally
Home Alone had when the mcallisters went on holiday they
forgot one minor detail Kevin. So now we sort of
cented ourselves into what a Christmas related tagline might be.
(12:29):
Let's go back to die Hard and see what the
die Hard taglines are the shortest one just says forty
stories of sheer adventure and an exclamation mark is all
in capital letters as well, so I think it needs
to be shouted forty stories of sheer adventure. Well, that's
not very Christmasy. The slightly longer one was twelve terrorists,
one cop. The odds are against John McLean and that's
(12:52):
just the way he likes it. And then, finally, the
longest text that I found on a Diehard poster used
at the time said, high above the city of La
a team of terrorists has seized a building, taken hostages,
and declared war. One man has managed to escape, an
off duty cop hiding somewhere inside. He's alone, tired, and
(13:13):
the only chance anyone has got. So I think it's
exceptionally clear that at the time contemporariously, when the movie
came out, it was not regarded as a Christmas movie.
It was not sold that way, and I am absolutely
positive that if twentieth century Fox thought they could make
money selling it at a Christmas movie, they would have
done so, and they didn't. So let's move to the
final lens, which is the cultural lens, and this becomes
(13:35):
more and more important, because over time this can shift
and change and becomes our interpretation, our shared interpretation of
what the movie is. So the intent of a piece
of art becomes less and less important. And if you
think about paintings, famous paintings or sculptures from way back
when we don't really necessarily know or even care why
they were created. We care more about what they mean
(13:57):
to us. And also the commercial lens we really don't get,
like who commissioned the piece of art is not that
important to us. What we really care about is what
we think of it now and what it means for us,
So you could argue the cultural lens is the most important.
So one fun thing to do is that IMDb have
these user generated lists where anyone who signed up for
(14:18):
free to IMDb can create a list of movies or
or actors or crew members and say, here is my
list of you know, my favorite movies. Interestingly, IMDb started
way back when as a Usenet list of actresses with
nice eyes, so IMDb lists have been at the core
of IMDb before there really even was an IMDb, so
it's really integral to what IMDb is. And there are
(14:40):
huge numbers of lists I mean I found just over
two thousand public lists which had Christmas in the title,
so things like the top ten Christmas Movies of all time,
or Christmas Movies or one hundred movies set in Christmas time.
And so I gathered data on all of those lists
and all of the movies within those lists, and because
a lot of people are citing the same movies, ended
up with a list of three hundred and twenty movies
(15:04):
which various numbers of people are happy to publicly declare
these are Christmas e So what was the number one
cited Christmas movie? Here's a piece of trivia. You can
have a think while I'm while I'm setting this up,
what movie is the most frequently cited on lists of
Christmas movies and IMDb? And I can tell you that
it was this The top movie was on two thirds
(15:26):
of everyone's list. So that's not only is it cited
very often, it's cited by most people. Hiya pal, It's
Home Alone. Home Alone is the most frequently cited Christmas
movie on IMDb lists, followed closely by Elf, then the
Santa Claus Christmas Vacation, the Polar Express, and have a
Grinch stole Christmas. So where does Diehard sit on this list?
(15:49):
Out of the three hundred and twenty movies that were
ever cited as Christmas movies, die Hard is the twenty
second most cited Christmas movie. So there are only twenty
t one movies in all of history which IMDb users
together think are more Christmas ey than die Hard. That's
quite a strong connection in the cultural realm to do
(16:10):
with Christmas and die Hard. Okay, let's take a different
angle into trying to measure culture. One of the things
that we can look at is the interest in the
movie and how it changes over time. Because if something
is a very Christmas ey movie, you would imagine that
people get more interested in it around Christmas time. And
so one thing we can do to check this is
Wikipedia has all of its page views available, so you
(16:34):
can see how many people are looking at each article
on each day. And so I went in and had
a look at the viewing figures for movies that we
know are Christmasy, and as you'd expect, they get between
thirty and fifty percent of all their views in December. Fine,
we now have a benchmark. I went back and then
had a look at other action films to see if
there was any kind of pattern there, so I looked
at Lethal Weapon Raisies, are the Lost Arcs and Samurai
(16:57):
Aliens all just sort of movies that are very good,
high new rated action movies, and their spread is throughout
the year. There's no one month when everyone looks at
action movies. So how does Diehard fit this pattern? Well, neatly,
it fits kind of in the middle. So about a
quarter of all the views for die Hard happen in December,
(17:19):
so that's quite a significant uptick. However, it's not as
extreme as that you find with other Christmas movies, so
they're still interest throughout the rest of the year. And
then finally we can look at Google trends. So Google
trends measure what people are searching for. It doesn't tell
us how many people are searching, but it gives us
a relative interest. So when was the most popular over
the time period we're looking at for that term, and
(17:41):
everything else is then based on that. So if like
two years before that it was half as popular, it'll
get half the rating. Well, if we look at the
data between the beginning of two thousand and four and
Christmas twenty and twenty one, so we're looking at a
very long period of time. We can see that for
the first ten years or so of this time period,
there was nothing special around Christmas and die Hard. Diehard
(18:02):
wasn't searched more around the Christmas period really until say
twenty eleven, twenty twelve. Then once you get to around
twenty fourteen, they start to see a very noticeable bump
around Christmas time, and that bump increases and increases and increases,
to the extent to which in the high point of
searching for die Hard across the last almost twenty years
(18:23):
of data is Christmas twenty twenty. So what we can
see from here is not only are people thinking about
Diehard a lot more over Christmas periods, they're actually doing
more so each year. So when I wrote the original
version of this article, it was in twenty eighteen, and
it was much more of a is Diehard a Christmas movie?
Yes or no? Whereas now it's seen as a completely
(18:45):
inevitable question by many people, like why would you even
question this? The way that you might say is l
for Christmas movie. This is something that's been growing over time,
and I have no reason to think that it will
stop growing over time, especially as I've already noticed that
it's already on sort of a lot of these streaming
services that have die Hard will put it in the
Christmas package, partly because people want it been there, and
(19:06):
partly because they'll know it'll create controversy and that's what
they want. So I think what we can say is
that die Hard may or may not have been a
Christmas movie, but it definitely is now and will be
more so in the future. But in the meantime, I
have a very merry Christmas.
Speaker 1 (19:22):
And a great job on the storytelling in production by
Greg and a special thanks to Steven Follows. My goodness,
there's so much good stuff here, but the idea that
the soundtrack played so much Christmas music was a deal
maker for me, at ninety nine percent more than every
other film. But I also think that his article created
(19:43):
more interest. But the American people the world has spoken.
When you're ranked number twenty two in history for being
considered a Christmas movie, well then you're a Christmas movie.
By the way, if you have movie questions for Steve
and or are looking for film data and answers, go
to Stephen Follows dot com. That's s T. E. P
H E. N Follows dot com. The story of whether
(20:06):
Diehard is a Christmas movie answered definitively. I think here
on our American stories
And we continue with our American stories, and we all
have our favorite movies to cuddle up with at Christmas time,
from It's a Wonderful Life a Miracle on thirty Fourth Street.
But for many people, Diehard is one such film that
makes the festive playlist. But is it actually a Christmas move?
Here to settle this question once and for all, is
(00:35):
Stephen Followed. Stephen is an established data researcher in the
film industry and wrote the widely circulated answer to this
hotly debated question on his website Stephenfollows dot com. Here's
Stephen with the story of how he came up with
a definitive answer.
Speaker 2 (00:54):
Hi, my name is Stephen Follows, and I am a
film data analyst. Every week I do a new bit
of research into the film industry. And sometimes it's sort
of very crunchy, and other times it's kind of lighter
and fun. And you know, we've tested different types of
popcorn in different theater chains and discovered who's got the
same supplier, and you know, all sorts of fun, interesting,
(01:16):
strange things. And so a few years ago I was
talking to some students and I was trying to get
them to engage with the idea of what a movie is,
and in doing so I stumbled upon an argument that
I did not expect to be quite as visceral as
it turned out to be. I asked them whether they
(01:38):
thought die Hard was a Christmas movie or not. That's it,
that's the question. That was the simple question that I
asked them, and I thought it would be a quick
entry point, and honestly, it took the entire day because
there was about thirty students and they all studied through
(02:00):
growing in questions and obviously it is a Christmas movie.
Obviously it's not a Christmas movie, And so I ended
up splitting them into different groups. They did different bits
of research, and at the end of that day we
had a fairly satisfying answer. And so then I went home,
and that next week I did some more data research.
I got a bit further into it, and I wrote
it up as a blog article, thinking, okay, well, this
(02:21):
is a fun exploration of movies and a nice thing
to do at Christmas. Since then, the question has become
a bigger and bigger cultural moment, and also my article,
which I think is the one that people I don't
think anyone's got into more detail than I have. That's
not necessarily a good thing for me, but certainly I
(02:41):
think I have the most comprehensive data exploration of the question.
And so that's what I wanted to share with you
today was what I did to try and answer this
question and what the data tells us. And then at
the end we can properly answer is die Hard a
Christmas movie or not? So the first thing to clear
up is what is die Well. I'm not going to
go into too much detail, but essentially it is an
(03:03):
action thriller from nineteen eighty eight, which I highly recommend.
It's a terrific film Christmas or no, and it's about
a grizzled New York cop becomes a one man army
to take on a group of German bank Roberts who
are holding the CoP's wife and her unlucky colleagues hostage
in a high rise building. The film takes place at
Christmas and has Christmasy bits, but as we'll see, this
(03:25):
is right on the biting point of is it Christmasy enough?
But it certainly happens at Christmas and there's a Christmas
party in it. Interestingly, the plot of the movie comes
from a book called Nothing Lasts Forever, which is itself
a sequel to another book called The Detective. And in
nineteen sixty eight there was a movie adaptation of The
Detective starring Frank Sinatra.
Speaker 3 (03:47):
Still us a little juck, she.
Speaker 2 (03:49):
Used a pusher, she's an addict, and she's nineteen years
old as towns crawling with kids the same age, I'll
go on the same route, part of the Great Society.
So bizarrely, when the production team came to make die Hard,
they contractually had to offer the main role of die
Hard to a seventy three year old Frank Sinatra. Fortunately
for us, he turned it down, and so the role
(04:11):
of Johnmanclane went to Bruce Willis and it became one
of his defining action films, and argue you, one of
the defining action films of the genre. So loads of
people love die Hard. It's a very fun movie. It's
got great action, it's got some wit, some charm, it's
got some great set pieces, and all in all, it's
just one of those movies that really came together and
also helped define a genre because it was sort of
(04:32):
late eighties leading into the nineties of one of those
huge explosion, heavy action films, and it's just it's just
great fun, very kind of. It's also got Alan Rickman
doing a fantastic turn and loads of secretary characters that
are interesting. It's a fun watch. So let's start with creative.
(04:53):
If we go into the script and we just simply
have a look at how many times the word Christmas appears,
then it appears eight times in a script. Well is
that a lot? Is that not a lot? Let's compare
it to other words. So explode only appears four times,
die five times, hard eleven times, shoot twelve, kill thirteen,
(05:14):
blood thirteen, so that all of Christmas is more present
in the script in a text form than those words.
But there are words like gun, which appears seventy three
times in a script, terrorist fifty one times, which is
interesting on a couple of levels. One because of the
prevalence of it, but second of all, they're not terrorists.
Alan Rickman and his band are bank robbers. They're using
(05:35):
terrorism as they're sort of cover, but they're just propping
the bank. It's interesting how we even the script calls
the terrorists when they're not and then the word suddenly
appears forty five times, So we can say that Christmas
is definitely present, but it's not, you know, in text forms.
The most important thing. Interestingly, there is actually a reference
within it that's talking about run DMC's Christmas in the
Holliss whether that's Christmasy enough. So there is actually a
(05:57):
meta conversation in the movie. We will put that to
one side because I don't think we can go into
more detail. Right if we were some soones.
Speaker 1 (06:06):
Christmas music, we.
Speaker 2 (06:10):
Can look at the people who made the movie and
see what they think. So there's two writers credited on it,
and one of them is Stephen Desusa, and he was
quoted as saying, if die Hard is not a Christmas movie,
then White Christmas is not a Christmas movie, and he
pointed out that it takes place at Christmas, features a
Christmas party and the christ like sacrifice of John McClain
walking on broken glass. I would argue that's perhaps artistic license.
(06:34):
I'm not saying it's not true. It's just that is
a poetic reading of it. And if we want a
poetic reading of the other side of the argument, then
we only have to go to Bruce Willis, who said.
Speaker 3 (06:44):
Die Hard is not a Christmas movie, it's a Bruce
Willis movie.
Speaker 2 (06:56):
So I think both of those two balance each other
out because I don't think either of them using a
lot of evidence, but they're definitely expressing opinion from key
people involved. One of the nice things about doing research
around movies is that you get to watch a lot
of movies, and so I had to watch Diehard had
I got to watch Diehard again and again for this research.
And one of the things I did was I went
(07:17):
in and looked at all the Christmasy elements, so Santa
hats and Ho ho ho and Christmas trees and things
like that. I found twenty one distinct Christmas elements, which
is quite a lot. I can't do a visual analysis
of every movie released over the last thirty years. As
a comparison, I looked at the running time of all
movies over the last thirty years, and it would take
one million, three hundred and fifty six two hundred and
(07:40):
forty two hours to watch them, and my wife said,
I wasn't allowed to. One thing that we can do
in looking at the creative part of the movie is
to look at the songs that are in the movie,
and there are quite a lot of Christmasy songs. In
the movie. So in Diehard, we've got Christmas in the Hollies,
we've got Winter Wonderland, a whistled section of jingle bells,
and let It Snow is over the end credits. That's
(08:00):
a lot of Christmasy songs. I went back and did
some data research into the databases that are online around
songs in movies, and I found that Diehard is more
christmas Y music wise than ninety nine point two percent
of all movies released over the last thirty years, So
that's quite a lot. Most movies do not have Christmas
(08:23):
songs in them, and the ones that do only really
have one Christmas song in there, so that makes Diehard
a very Christmasy film just from a music perspective. Incidentally,
the most commonly used Christmas song in movies of the
last thirty years is jingle Bells, which is in about
a third of movies that have at least one Christmas song,
they feature jingle bells. And here is your bonus fact
(08:45):
trivia for today. Jingle Bells is not actually a Christmas
song and was meant to be about Thanksgiving, but over
time it's changed. So there is an interesting thing something
that we now think of as as Christmas, ey is
the most Christmasy you can imagine. It is the most
sighted Christmas song. Actually wasn't created as something that's Christmas Eve,
but culture has changed over the years.
Speaker 1 (09:06):
And you're listening to Stephen Follows telling the story of
how he and his class tried to answer the question
is die Hard a Christmas movie? I already think it's answered.
But what do you think when we come back more
from Stephen Follows here on our American stories, and we
(09:42):
continue with our American stories, and we're going to return
now to Stephen Follows, who is telling the story of
how he and his class tried to answer the question,
the burning question of the day, is Diehard a Christmas movie?
Let's return to Stephen scond.
Speaker 2 (10:00):
We could look at it as a piece of commerce.
It's a commercial product, right, there's an IP there, and
it's made by a major studio and is being sold commercially.
So we're focusing on it as a commercial product, you know,
to fuel catalyst industry, which is propelled by marketing and
responds to consumer demands. So one of the first questions
I asked, if someone says, yes, Diehard was definitely a
(10:22):
Christmas movie I say, well, when do Christmas movies come out?
People say in November and December, And by the way,
they're absolutely right. I did some data analysis and found
that almost every movies with Christmas in the title, about
fifty five percent come out in November, about thirty percent
come out in December, and most of the others come
out in October. So Christmas movies definitely come out around Christmas,
no shock there. But when did Diehard come out? Well,
(10:44):
it came out in July or February, depending on whether
you're where you are in the world, because it came
out in July eighty eight in America and February eighty
nine in the UK, so both very distinctly not Christmas
periods and very clearly not. So this sort of indicates
to us that the studio at the time did not
see this as a Christmas in movie. We can look
(11:06):
at how the movie was marketed to moviegoers as well.
So movies that are explicitly Christmas movies tend to have
a lot of very clear patterns to them. We'll see red,
we'll see green, we see Santa Hats, we see presents,
we see snow, we see Santa Claus, himself. You know,
there's lots of elements that are very very clearly Christmasy.
But if we look at the die Hard poster, we
(11:28):
just see two buildings with an explosion and John McClain's
face and some text that is not Christmasy. And then finally,
within the commercial intent, we can look at what the
tagline was, because the poster has lots of text and
certainly there is a huge amount of information on the poster.
(11:49):
So there were different posters and they had different taglines.
So if we first start by looking at Christmas movies,
Christmas movies tend to have taglines that are around Christmas.
So there's a horror film called Cramp and the tagline
is you better Watch out for Elf. It was this
holiday discover your Inner Elf. The Polar Express had this
(12:09):
holiday season, Believe National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation had You'll Crack Up,
which is a pun I rather enjoy. And then finally
Home Alone had when the mcallisters went on holiday they
forgot one minor detail Kevin. So now we sort of
cented ourselves into what a Christmas related tagline might be.
(12:29):
Let's go back to die Hard and see what the
die Hard taglines are the shortest one just says forty
stories of sheer adventure and an exclamation mark is all
in capital letters as well, so I think it needs
to be shouted forty stories of sheer adventure. Well, that's
not very Christmasy. The slightly longer one was twelve terrorists,
one cop. The odds are against John McLean and that's
(12:52):
just the way he likes it. And then, finally, the
longest text that I found on a Diehard poster used
at the time said, high above the city of La
a team of terrorists has seized a building, taken hostages,
and declared war. One man has managed to escape, an
off duty cop hiding somewhere inside. He's alone, tired, and
(13:13):
the only chance anyone has got. So I think it's
exceptionally clear that at the time contemporariously, when the movie
came out, it was not regarded as a Christmas movie.
It was not sold that way, and I am absolutely
positive that if twentieth century Fox thought they could make
money selling it at a Christmas movie, they would have
done so, and they didn't. So let's move to the
final lens, which is the cultural lens, and this becomes
(13:35):
more and more important, because over time this can shift
and change and becomes our interpretation, our shared interpretation of
what the movie is. So the intent of a piece
of art becomes less and less important. And if you
think about paintings, famous paintings or sculptures from way back
when we don't really necessarily know or even care why
they were created. We care more about what they mean
(13:57):
to us. And also the commercial lens we really don't get,
like who commissioned the piece of art is not that
important to us. What we really care about is what
we think of it now and what it means for us,
So you could argue the cultural lens is the most important.
So one fun thing to do is that IMDb have
these user generated lists where anyone who signed up for
(14:18):
free to IMDb can create a list of movies or
or actors or crew members and say, here is my
list of you know, my favorite movies. Interestingly, IMDb started
way back when as a Usenet list of actresses with
nice eyes, so IMDb lists have been at the core
of IMDb before there really even was an IMDb, so
it's really integral to what IMDb is. And there are
(14:40):
huge numbers of lists I mean I found just over
two thousand public lists which had Christmas in the title,
so things like the top ten Christmas Movies of all time,
or Christmas Movies or one hundred movies set in Christmas time.
And so I gathered data on all of those lists
and all of the movies within those lists, and because
a lot of people are citing the same movies, ended
up with a list of three hundred and twenty movies
(15:04):
which various numbers of people are happy to publicly declare
these are Christmas e So what was the number one
cited Christmas movie? Here's a piece of trivia. You can
have a think while I'm while I'm setting this up,
what movie is the most frequently cited on lists of
Christmas movies and IMDb? And I can tell you that
it was this The top movie was on two thirds
(15:26):
of everyone's list. So that's not only is it cited
very often, it's cited by most people. Hiya pal, It's
Home Alone. Home Alone is the most frequently cited Christmas
movie on IMDb lists, followed closely by Elf, then the
Santa Claus Christmas Vacation, the Polar Express, and have a
Grinch stole Christmas. So where does Diehard sit on this list?
(15:49):
Out of the three hundred and twenty movies that were
ever cited as Christmas movies, die Hard is the twenty
second most cited Christmas movie. So there are only twenty
t one movies in all of history which IMDb users
together think are more Christmas ey than die Hard. That's
quite a strong connection in the cultural realm to do
(16:10):
with Christmas and die Hard. Okay, let's take a different
angle into trying to measure culture. One of the things
that we can look at is the interest in the
movie and how it changes over time. Because if something
is a very Christmas ey movie, you would imagine that
people get more interested in it around Christmas time. And
so one thing we can do to check this is
Wikipedia has all of its page views available, so you
(16:34):
can see how many people are looking at each article
on each day. And so I went in and had
a look at the viewing figures for movies that we
know are Christmasy, and as you'd expect, they get between
thirty and fifty percent of all their views in December. Fine,
we now have a benchmark. I went back and then
had a look at other action films to see if
there was any kind of pattern there, so I looked
at Lethal Weapon Raisies, are the Lost Arcs and Samurai
(16:57):
Aliens all just sort of movies that are very good,
high new rated action movies, and their spread is throughout
the year. There's no one month when everyone looks at
action movies. So how does Diehard fit this pattern? Well, neatly,
it fits kind of in the middle. So about a
quarter of all the views for die Hard happen in December,
(17:19):
so that's quite a significant uptick. However, it's not as
extreme as that you find with other Christmas movies, so
they're still interest throughout the rest of the year. And
then finally we can look at Google trends. So Google
trends measure what people are searching for. It doesn't tell
us how many people are searching, but it gives us
a relative interest. So when was the most popular over
the time period we're looking at for that term, and
(17:41):
everything else is then based on that. So if like
two years before that it was half as popular, it'll
get half the rating. Well, if we look at the
data between the beginning of two thousand and four and
Christmas twenty and twenty one, so we're looking at a
very long period of time. We can see that for
the first ten years or so of this time period,
there was nothing special around Christmas and die Hard. Diehard
(18:02):
wasn't searched more around the Christmas period really until say
twenty eleven, twenty twelve. Then once you get to around
twenty fourteen, they start to see a very noticeable bump
around Christmas time, and that bump increases and increases and increases,
to the extent to which in the high point of
searching for die Hard across the last almost twenty years
(18:23):
of data is Christmas twenty twenty. So what we can
see from here is not only are people thinking about
Diehard a lot more over Christmas periods, they're actually doing
more so each year. So when I wrote the original
version of this article, it was in twenty eighteen, and
it was much more of a is Diehard a Christmas movie?
Yes or no? Whereas now it's seen as a completely
(18:45):
inevitable question by many people, like why would you even
question this? The way that you might say is l
for Christmas movie. This is something that's been growing over time,
and I have no reason to think that it will
stop growing over time, especially as I've already noticed that
it's already on sort of a lot of these streaming
services that have die Hard will put it in the
Christmas package, partly because people want it been there, and
(19:06):
partly because they'll know it'll create controversy and that's what
they want. So I think what we can say is
that die Hard may or may not have been a
Christmas movie, but it definitely is now and will be
more so in the future. But in the meantime, I
have a very merry Christmas.
Speaker 1 (19:22):
And a great job on the storytelling in production by
Greg and a special thanks to Steven Follows. My goodness,
there's so much good stuff here, but the idea that
the soundtrack played so much Christmas music was a deal
maker for me, at ninety nine percent more than every
other film. But I also think that his article created
(19:43):
more interest. But the American people the world has spoken.
When you're ranked number twenty two in history for being
considered a Christmas movie, well then you're a Christmas movie.
By the way, if you have movie questions for Steve
and or are looking for film data and answers, go
to Stephen Follows dot com. That's s T. E. P
H E. N Follows dot com. The story of whether
(20:06):
Diehard is a Christmas movie answered definitively. I think here
on our American stories
Host
Lee Habeeb
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