The return of the festive family blockbuster

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Avatar be damned – the past few years have shown audiences will embrace real family hits, if you’ll let them. Over the last few years, festive cinema audiences have embraced old Hollywood. Not just in a literal sense – traditional Christmas faves It’s A Wonderful Life, Home Alone et al have been increasingly sneaking into ... The return of the festive family blockbuster

Avatar be damned – the past few years have shown audiences will embrace real family hits, if you’ll let them.

Over the last few years, festive cinema audiences have embraced old Hollywood. Not just in a literal sense – traditional Christmas faves It’s A Wonderful Life, Home Alone et al have been increasingly sneaking into the UK top ten in recent Decembers – but in a stylistic one. If the post-lockdown years have seen a revival of the big screen musical, most of that energy has been contained to the months when families, surprisingly, have a load of time off and nothing to do with it.

Matilda: The Musical (2022) – sent out to cinemas by Sony in the UK, and locked into a Netflix contract in the US – gave us a tantalising taste of what was to come, spending three consecutive weeks atop the UK box office before its Christmas crown was snatched by global juggernaut Avatar: This Time With Whaling.

Wonka (2023) shocked everyone when the prequel to one of the world’s biggest children’s books led by Hollywood’s only 20-something movie star (and directed by Mr Paddington himself, Paul King) turned out to be a hit; it spent six weeks atop the UK box office, beating out Oppenheimer and The Super Mario Bros. Movie to become the second highest-grossing film of the year.

Last year’s Wicked, interestingly, fell off the UK number one spot after just one week, dethroned by the similarly musical (if less fun) Moana 2. It nonetheless ended the year as the year’s highest-grossing film (almost as if financial success isn’t entirely predicated on a film’s first 10 days in cinemas; funny, that). Wicked: For Good, already putting a shift in with a £40m big screen return, will be looking to stave off big blue upstart Avatar: Whales On A Flame when it splashes onto screens this week.

It’s a marked change from the pre-pandemic decade, which saw the “big Christmas film” flip between a series of action-blockbuster franchises. The Hobbit movies, Fantastic Beasts and Disney’s Star Wars dominated family cinema viewing in every year bar-one from 2012 to 2019. James Cameron’s Avatar sequels have carried some of that energy into the 2020s – but it’s telling that, for the British public especially, the sort of films we’re willing to buy a family’s worth of tickets for over the holidays are now following a very different pattern.

It suggests, to a certain extent, that what we’re seeing as family entertainment now has changed. For years, the sort of film which succeeded in the festive season didn’t look a whole lot different to what worked the rest of the year. One of Black Panther, Jurassic World and Spider-Man: No Way Home was released in December, and a crisp handshake will go to whoever can tell me which (spoiler: it’s not the one explicitly set at Christmas).

Now though, darker evenings are increasingly home to the kinds of films conventional wisdom says wouldn’t work at all the rest of the year. The BBFC certificate of a blockbuster has been steadily creeping up over the years (in fact, the most-commonly awarded certificate for several years now has been a 15), and the PG family movie has been more-or-less limited to animated or explicitly kid-friendly films for some time. You’d think twice before taking plenty of under-eights to a 12A flick, just as a 16-year-old might not get a lot out of Zootropolis 2.

But Wonka and the Wicked flicks offer that rarest of commodities: PG, live-action spectacle that’s inclusive, rather than exclusive. A huge part of their charm and seasonal success has to come down to the fact that they’re making genuine efforts to appeal to everyone (and not in a bland, corporate spaghetti sort of way). They’re proof that there is actually a market for stuff the entire extended family can enjoy without seeing a frightening number of Disney+ shows first.

Or there is, at least, at Christmas. A part of me’s a little sad Avatar: Now You Don’t is about to steal a chunk of Wicked: For Good’s festive screen space. The blue cat-alien movie would probably work released any time of the year and, more to the point, there’s no way I could see it with my mum. Why can’t it give good cheer a chance? There’s plenty of evidence over the last few years to say it can work.