Over 164 new Christmas movies are being released this year. Our friends at Top10Casinos have broken down Netflix’s highest rated Christmas rom-coms using IMDb and Twitter to compile the list. Check out the list below.
- Love Hard (2021)
Coming in first place with a staggering 79/100 points is Love Hard. This magical modern search for love was released last Christmas but still sits as a firm favourite among the Netflix romantic Christmas movies. Nina Dobrev plays the lead Natalie Bauer. Natalie joins a dating app in a last-ditch attempt at finding love before Christmas. Things go awry when she goes to surprise the person she’s been talking to for the holidays. Flying all the way to the East Coast from LA Natalie discovers the heart throb she can’t stop thinking about is a catfish. Follow this light-hearted romantic comedy as all the characters search for love.
- The Noel Diary (2022)
Second place goes to a brand new release, The Noel Diary, at 71/100. This engaging movie follows a man’s complex relationship with his family and his journey to reconnect with his father after his mother’s death. Along the way he meets a mysterious girl who has more ties to his family than he could have ever expected. In his search for a childhood he’d forgotten and the love he craved, she discovers what she’s wanted to know her whole life. Who her mother is. With a plethora of twists and turns this wonderful movie will have you on the edge of your seat, tissues in hand.
- Christmas With You (2022)
Another new release secured third place, Christmas With You, scored 62/100 and it is clear to see why. This movie follows pop sensation Angelina’s experience of fame from a young age and the burn out that follows.. In a hunt to be reinspired for a song before her label kicks her she does a last ditch attempt at reconnecting with her fans. In doing so she goes to a small town that couldn’t be more different from her life in Manhattan where she meets a young girl, her music teacher dad and loving grandma. Not only does Angelina find the inspiration she was looking for, she also finds love and the Christmas spirit she hasn’t felt since her mother died. A moving and fun spin on a classic Christmas romance trope.
- Holidate (2020)
Closely following at fourth is Holidate, scoring 62/100. Holidate follows two strangers, both sick of having to find dates for parties or events who agree to platonically go together, for an entire year. All is fine at the start – their respective families are happy, they are having fun. That is until they slowly start to show signs of falling in love. Holidate is a slow burn romance everybody saw coming – you can only lie about love for so long, until it becomes true. When the characters finally admit their true feelings, where will it lead them? A romantic comedy to last through the ages and is sure to become a Christmastime classic.
- Single All the Way (2021)
At fifth place comes an LGBTQ+ Christmas icon scoring 58/100 – Single All the Way. When Peter goes home for the holidays he is desperate to avoid his family’s disappointment at his non-existent love life when he discovers his partner was already married. He convinces his best friend to step in as his boyfriend to appease his eccentric family. His mother knowing better sets Peter up on a blind date with a local hunk. All is going well until his nieces start meddling in his love life making Peter see his true feelings. He is in love with his best friend, and always has been. Terrified of ruining their friendship, his love is repressed until it can’t be hidden anymore and it comes out in an explosion of emotion. A Christmas film full of positive representation and comedy worthy of this list.
- Falling For Christmas (2022)
Starring Lindsay Lohan, Falling For Christmas came sixth on this list scoring 57/100 for the romantic comedy that made Mean Girls fans swoon. This story follows a rich daddy’s girl’s adventure after a proposal gone wrong that leads to her falling down a ski slope. When a handsome lodge owner finds her unconscious at the bottom of the mountain he takes her to the hospital where they are soon to discover she has no idea who she is. She stays with the lodge owner and his charming daughter as she relearns what life is supposed to be. A reality so far from a life she once knew. As things change, his feelings for her develop – that is until her fiance finds her. Will she go back to the life she’d forgotten or stay for the new life she has built?
- Return to Christmas Creek (2018)
Return to Christmas Creek is a cosy Christmas romcom that is bound to hit you where it hurts comes in seventh with 47/100. It explores a complex family dynamic and the trauma that came from one bad family Christmas. As the main character Amilia attempts to understand what went so wrong, and reconnect with what Christmas is truly about she fixes her family and finds old love along the way. Best friends turned strangers, turned lovers. What more could you want out of a small town Christmas movie?
- A Castle for Christmas (2021)
Set in the picturesque Scottish Highlands A Castle for Christmas ranks eighth on this list scoring 40/100. Steeped in family history an author escapes scandal by visiting a place she has only heard stories of. Her father grew up in Scotland and she is determined to visit the castle in which he worked. A rude Duke greets her and starts a feud. When she discovers that the castle is up for sale she must do something about it to save her fathers memory. In doing so she creates friends, nemesis and even a love for a certain grumpy duke who is reluctant to give in to an American.
- A California Christmas (2020)
When the CEO of a mega corporation sends you undercover at a farm on the land they want what could go wrong? Ninth place A California Christmas can tell you! Scoring 33/100 it is definitely an emotional rollercoaster. Following the carefree son of a CEO trying to convince the beautiful farmer to sell her land by pretending to be a farm hand himself. With the risk of losing his inheritance if he fails and no prior experience he is far out of his depth. Falling for the farmer wasn’t in his plan but it’s inevitable. She shows him a new way of life. A love of the farm he’s supposed to be buying. A goofy story of a farmer and a city boy crossing paths and beating all odds to overcome deception and circumstance.
- The Princess Switch (2018)
Tenth on the list is The Princess Switch, scoring 28/100. Two people living completely different lives but look identical. One a baker, one a princess. When they cross paths at a baking competition they decide to switch identities for two days, both desperate to experience a life different to their own. People closest to the women are quick to figure this out – except for the best friend and the fiance. Love blooms in unlikely and impractical places, when their lives go back to normal will they be able to leave behind the new loves they have made?
- The Knight Before Christmas (2019)
A movie filled with magic and wonder comes in at eleven, The Knight Before Christmas scored 27/100 – whilst the figure sounds low it is still of the top 12 romantic Chrismtas movies on Netflix! When a mediaeval knight gets sent forward in time to modern day Ohio his life’s view is forever changed. Along the way he meets Brooke, a science teacher at the local school. Together they work to understand what quest he has been sent on and how to fulfil it to return him home. As time goes on and love grows the mysterious knight is more reluctant to return to his old life, unless Brooke can go with him.
- A Christmas Prince (2017)
Last on our Top 12 Romantic Christmas Movies on Netflix is a well loved classic – A Christmas Prince scored 21/100. When an editor finally gets her big break as a journalist she will do anything to get the story the magazine has requested; including going undercover as a tutor for the princess. Tasked with finding out about the mysterious playboy prince a bond begins to form, fighting with her heart and her mind she continues her undercover investigation. Her undercover mission gets revealed, the prince suddenly has to fight for his throne and a love to last a lifetime is pushed to its breaking point.
Methodology –
- Top10Casinos conducted this research to determine the most popular Netflix Christmas movies. This study conducts a sentiment analysis of over 30,000 tweets1 along with iMDB ratings and popularity rankings in order to create a robust ranking metric.
- Firstly, a seed list of popular movies is collected using articles from notable publications. Tweets containing the most popular hashtag representing each movie are then scraped and parsed2
- Standard NLP preprocessing methods such as word tokenization and lemmatization were subsequently applied. An application of the VADER sentiment analysis model then yielded polarity scores by which tweets were labelled. A compound polarity of +- 0.25 from 0 was labelled as positive/negative respectively.
- Tweets were then aggregated to compute for each movie the total number of tweets, average likes per tweet and positive tweet ratio.3 Our results were supplemented by iMDB ratings and popularity ranking.
- A popularity score computed using the above factors with greater weight given to iMDB statistics was then used to rank each movie.
- Descriptions of each movie were then created using Netflix descriptions, Wikipedia plot descriptions and iMBD synopsis as inspiration.
- Data was collected on 29/11/2022 and is subject to change.
For more information check out the link here.
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