November 26, 2024 • 20 mins
On this episode of Our American Stories, here to settle this question once and for all is Stephen Follows. 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.com.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:10):
And we continue with our American stories, and we're bringing
Christmas stories around the Christmas season because that's what we do.
We all have our favorite movies to cuddle up with
at Christmas time, from It's a Wonderful Life, It's a
Miracle on thirty fourth Street. But for many people, Diehard
is one such film that makes the festive playlist. But
(00:30):
is it actually a Christmas move? Here to settle this
question once and for all is Stephen Follows. Stephen is
an established data researcher in the film industry and wrote
the widely circulated answer to this hotly debated question on
his website Stephen Follows dot com. Here's Stephen with the
story of how he came up with a definitive answer.
Speaker 2 (00:54):
Hi, my name's Stephen Follows and I am a film
data analyst. Every week I do a new bit of
research into the film ministry. 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,
(01:14):
and you know, all sorts of fun, interesting, 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
(01:35):
turned out to be. I asked them whether they 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
(01:57):
there was about thirty students and they all studied through
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 that next week, I did some more data research,
(02:17):
I got a bit further into it, and I wrote
it up as a blog article, thinking, okay, well, this
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
(02:37):
not necessarily a good thing for me, but certainly I
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
(02:59):
up is what is Diehard? Well, I'm not going to
go into too much detail, but essentially it is an
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
(03:22):
Christmas and has Christmasy bits, but as we'll see, this
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
(03:44):
Detective starring Frank Sinatra.
Speaker 3 (03:47):
Still, he is a little jack.
Speaker 2 (03:49):
She's a pusher, she's an addict, and she's nineteen years old.
Speaker 1 (03:52):
As towns crawling with kids the same age, so I'll
go on the same route, part of the Great Society.
Speaker 2 (03:58):
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
of John McLaine 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
(04:20):
of people love die Hard. It's a very fun movie.
It's got great action, it's got some wits, 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 late eighties leading into the nineties of one of
those huge explosion heavy action films, and it's it's just
(04:40):
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.
If we go into the script and we just simply
have a look at how many times the word Christmas appears,
then it appears eighty times in a script. Well, is
(05:03):
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,
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
(05:23):
times in a script, terrorist fifty one times, which is
interesting on a couple 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 terrorism
as they're sort of cover, but they're just propping the bank.
It's interesting how even the script calls Hi terrorists when
they're not, and then the word suddenly appears forty five times,
(05:44):
so we can say that Christmas is definitely present, but
it's not, you know, in text form. The most important thing, interestingly,
there is actually a reference within it that's talking about
run DMC's Christmas in the hollis as whether that's Christmasy enough.
So there is actually a meta conversation in the movie.
But we'll put that to one side because I don't
think we can go into more detail.
Speaker 3 (06:03):
Right if we were some tunes.
Speaker 2 (06:06):
Christmas music, we 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
(06:28):
sacrifice of John McLain walking on broken glass. I would
argue that's perhaps artistic license. 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
to I got to watch Diehard again and again for
this research. And one of the things I did was
(07:17):
I went 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
(07:40):
and forty two hours to watch them. And my wife said,
I wasn't abowt 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 Ey 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 over 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 ass Christmasy is the most
Christmasy you can imagine. It is the most cited 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
(09:39):
continue with our American stories and our Christmas season storytelling,
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 die Hard a Christmas movie? Let's return to Stephen.
Speaker 2 (10:00):
Secondly, 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 catitalyst industry, which is propelled by marketing and
responds to consumer demands. So one of the first questions
I ask if someone says, yes, Diehard was definitely Christmas movie,
(10:23):
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,
(10:45):
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 clear not. So this sort of indicates
to us that the studio at the time did not
see this as a Christmas movie. We can look at
(11:07):
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 McLean'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. So there were different posters and they had
(11:51):
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 Crampus, and the
tagline is you better watch out for Elf. It was
this holiday discover your inner Elf. The Polar Express had
this holiday season, believe National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation had You'll
(12:15):
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 centered ourselves into what a Christmas related tagline might be.
Let's go back to die Hard and see what the
die Hard taglines are. The shortest one just says forty
(12:37):
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 Christmas e. The slightly longer one was twelve terrorists,
one cop. The odds are against John McLean and that's
just the way he likes it. And then finally, the
longest text that I found on a Diehard poster used
(12:59):
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
the only chance anyone has got. So I think it's
exceptionally clear that at the time contemporariously, when the movie
(13:21):
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 as 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
more and more important because over time this can shift
and change and becomes our interpretation, our shared interpretation of
(13:43):
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
to us. And also the commercial lens we really don't care,
like who commissioned the piece of art is not that
important to us. What we really care about is what
(14:05):
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 signs up for
free to IMDb can create a list of movies or
actors or crew members and say, here is my list
(14:25):
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 huge numbers
of lists. I mean I found just over two thousand
public lists which had Christmas in the title, so things
(14:47):
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 movie, I
ended up with a list of three hundred and twenty
movies which various numbers of people are happy to publicly
(15:08):
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
of everyone's list. So that's not only is it cited
(15:29):
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 the
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
one movies in all of history which IMDb users together
think are more Christmasy than die Hard. That's quite a
strong connection in the cultural realm to do with Christmas
(16:11):
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 Christmasy 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
(16:32):
of its page views available, so you 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
(16:52):
any kind of pattern there. So I looked at Lethal Weapon,
Raises of the Lost Arcs and Samurai Aliens, all just
sort of movies that are very good, highly rated action movies,
and their spread is throughout the year. There's no one
month when everyone looks at action movies. So how does
die Hard fit this pattern? Well, neatly, it fits kind
(17:14):
of in the middle. So about a quarter of all
the views for die Hard happen in December, so that's
quite a significant uptick. However, it's not as extreme as
that you find with other Christmas movies, so there's 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
(17:36):
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 everything else is
then based on that. So if like two years before
that it was half as popular, it'll get half of
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
(17:57):
ten years or so of this time period, there was
nothing special around Christmas and die Hard. Diehard wasn't searched
more around the Christmas period really until say twenty eleven,
twenty twelve. Then once we 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
(18:18):
extent to which in the high point of searching for
die Hard across the last almost twenty years 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
(18:41):
much more of a is Diehard a Christmas movie? Yes
or no? Whereas now it's seen as a completely 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 sort of a lot of these streaming services that
(19:01):
have die Hard will put it in the Christmas package,
partly because people want it in there, and partly because
they'll know it will 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, 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 to
Steve even follows dot com. That's s t e p
h e N follows dot com. The story of whether
(20:07):
Diehard is a Christmas movie answered definitively. I think here
on our American stories
And we continue with our American stories, and we're bringing
Christmas stories around the Christmas season because that's what we do.
We all have our favorite movies to cuddle up with
at Christmas time, from It's a Wonderful Life, It's a
Miracle on thirty fourth Street. But for many people, Diehard
is one such film that makes the festive playlist. But
(00:30):
is it actually a Christmas move? Here to settle this
question once and for all is Stephen Follows. Stephen is
an established data researcher in the film industry and wrote
the widely circulated answer to this hotly debated question on
his website Stephen Follows dot com. Here's Stephen with the
story of how he came up with a definitive answer.
Speaker 2 (00:54):
Hi, my name's Stephen Follows and I am a film
data analyst. Every week I do a new bit of
research into the film ministry. 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,
(01:14):
and you know, all sorts of fun, interesting, 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
(01:35):
turned out to be. I asked them whether they 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
(01:57):
there was about thirty students and they all studied through
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 that next week, I did some more data research,
(02:17):
I got a bit further into it, and I wrote
it up as a blog article, thinking, okay, well, this
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
(02:37):
not necessarily a good thing for me, but certainly I
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
(02:59):
up is what is Diehard? Well, I'm not going to
go into too much detail, but essentially it is an
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
(03:22):
Christmas and has Christmasy bits, but as we'll see, this
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
(03:44):
Detective starring Frank Sinatra.
Speaker 3 (03:47):
Still, he is a little jack.
Speaker 2 (03:49):
She's a pusher, she's an addict, and she's nineteen years old.
Speaker 1 (03:52):
As towns crawling with kids the same age, so I'll
go on the same route, part of the Great Society.
Speaker 2 (03:58):
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
of John McLaine 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
(04:20):
of people love die Hard. It's a very fun movie.
It's got great action, it's got some wits, 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 late eighties leading into the nineties of one of
those huge explosion heavy action films, and it's it's just
(04:40):
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.
If we go into the script and we just simply
have a look at how many times the word Christmas appears,
then it appears eighty times in a script. Well, is
(05:03):
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,
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
(05:23):
times in a script, terrorist fifty one times, which is
interesting on a couple 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 terrorism
as they're sort of cover, but they're just propping the bank.
It's interesting how even the script calls Hi terrorists when
they're not, and then the word suddenly appears forty five times,
(05:44):
so we can say that Christmas is definitely present, but
it's not, you know, in text form. The most important thing, interestingly,
there is actually a reference within it that's talking about
run DMC's Christmas in the hollis as whether that's Christmasy enough.
So there is actually a meta conversation in the movie.
But we'll put that to one side because I don't
think we can go into more detail.
Speaker 3 (06:03):
Right if we were some tunes.
Speaker 2 (06:06):
Christmas music, we 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
(06:28):
sacrifice of John McLain walking on broken glass. I would
argue that's perhaps artistic license. 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
to I got to watch Diehard again and again for
this research. And one of the things I did was
(07:17):
I went 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
(07:40):
and forty two hours to watch them. And my wife said,
I wasn't abowt 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 Ey 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 over 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 ass Christmasy is the most
Christmasy you can imagine. It is the most cited 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
(09:39):
continue with our American stories and our Christmas season storytelling,
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 die Hard a Christmas movie? Let's return to Stephen.
Speaker 2 (10:00):
Secondly, 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 catitalyst industry, which is propelled by marketing and
responds to consumer demands. So one of the first questions
I ask if someone says, yes, Diehard was definitely Christmas movie,
(10:23):
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,
(10:45):
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 clear not. So this sort of indicates
to us that the studio at the time did not
see this as a Christmas movie. We can look at
(11:07):
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 McLean'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. So there were different posters and they had
(11:51):
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 Crampus, and the
tagline is you better watch out for Elf. It was
this holiday discover your inner Elf. The Polar Express had
this holiday season, believe National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation had You'll
(12:15):
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 centered ourselves into what a Christmas related tagline might be.
Let's go back to die Hard and see what the
die Hard taglines are. The shortest one just says forty
(12:37):
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 Christmas e. The slightly longer one was twelve terrorists,
one cop. The odds are against John McLean and that's
just the way he likes it. And then finally, the
longest text that I found on a Diehard poster used
(12:59):
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
the only chance anyone has got. So I think it's
exceptionally clear that at the time contemporariously, when the movie
(13:21):
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 as 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
more and more important because over time this can shift
and change and becomes our interpretation, our shared interpretation of
(13:43):
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
to us. And also the commercial lens we really don't care,
like who commissioned the piece of art is not that
important to us. What we really care about is what
(14:05):
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 signs up for
free to IMDb can create a list of movies or
actors or crew members and say, here is my list
(14:25):
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 huge numbers
of lists. I mean I found just over two thousand
public lists which had Christmas in the title, so things
(14:47):
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 movie, I
ended up with a list of three hundred and twenty
movies which various numbers of people are happy to publicly
(15:08):
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
of everyone's list. So that's not only is it cited
(15:29):
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 the
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
one movies in all of history which IMDb users together
think are more Christmasy than die Hard. That's quite a
strong connection in the cultural realm to do with Christmas
(16:11):
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 Christmasy 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
(16:32):
of its page views available, so you 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
(16:52):
any kind of pattern there. So I looked at Lethal Weapon,
Raises of the Lost Arcs and Samurai Aliens, all just
sort of movies that are very good, highly rated action movies,
and their spread is throughout the year. There's no one
month when everyone looks at action movies. So how does
die Hard fit this pattern? Well, neatly, it fits kind
(17:14):
of in the middle. So about a quarter of all
the views for die Hard happen in December, so that's
quite a significant uptick. However, it's not as extreme as
that you find with other Christmas movies, so there's 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
(17:36):
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 everything else is
then based on that. So if like two years before
that it was half as popular, it'll get half of
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
(17:57):
ten years or so of this time period, there was
nothing special around Christmas and die Hard. Diehard wasn't searched
more around the Christmas period really until say twenty eleven,
twenty twelve. Then once we 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
(18:18):
extent to which in the high point of searching for
die Hard across the last almost twenty years 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
(18:41):
much more of a is Diehard a Christmas movie? Yes
or no? Whereas now it's seen as a completely 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 sort of a lot of these streaming services that
(19:01):
have die Hard will put it in the Christmas package,
partly because people want it in there, and partly because
they'll know it will 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, 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 to
Steve even follows dot com. That's s t e p
h e N follows dot com. The story of whether
(20:07):
Diehard is a Christmas movie answered definitively. I think here
on our American stories
Host
Lee Habeeb
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