The Elf Report 2020: Ranking the nation's favourite festive films, with science.

Section 1: It's a Wonderful List

Which films should we consider? Defining challenges and methodologies for efficient Yuletide comparison in a listicle-rich media landscape.

---

There's no shortage of 'Top 47 Christmas Movies EVER (Number 9 will make you wee!)'  lists floating around the internet these days. You literally can't doomscroll in peace for 30 seconds without being bombarded with them. They're a menace, frankly.

And the worst part is, they don't all agree.

As genuine certified* Crimbo scienticians, we can't abide this inconsistency - so we decided to do something about it. We needed to know, definitively, which is the best. But where to begin?

Well, since so many list-writers have already done the legwork, and in the spirit of festive cooperation, we started by checking out a bunch of existing 'studies'. That's called meta-analysis and it's proper science.

We decided to meta-analyse the top 25 films from 25 published lists - that's 625 Christmas movies. And that's a lot of movies, Barbara.

*not certified

As it turns out, there's quite a lot of overlap between lists. Once we plugged them all into our algorithm-machine, those potential 625 comfort-and-joy-fests actually worked out to a still-respectably-jolly 153.

We assigned each film a score based on the where, if at all, it ranked on each of the 25 lists. Hey presto, job done! A definitive list of the top cinematic Christmas crackers.

***

Except... is it? Really?

Who's to say the people writing all those lists even knew what they were on about? They could very well be a fiendish flock of festive fibbers.

Not to be tinsel tattle-tales, but one Joal Ryan of Metacritic had La La Land as the 2nd best holiday movie of the century. La La Land. Let that sink in.

Obviously we were going to need to sort the crimbly from the crummy. And to do that, we'd need to dig deep into the data.

Section 3: Mistletoe and Datamining

Collecting more data for film comparison. Identification and collation of key jolliness-markers in search of Christmas consensus.

---

If we were to get any further in our epic Christmas quest to whittle down our list, there was something missing. We simply needed more data.

Data is the lifeblood of any legitimate scientific study and THIS IS DEFINITELY ONE OF THOSE, so let's dive in and see what we discovered...

---

Money Money Money.

As any true connoisseur of the arts knows, the key metric for measuring a movie's greatness is how much cold hard cash it made. Surely adding this data to our model would shed some light.

We tracked down all the financials we could for each film. Then we adjusted for inflation because that's a thing people do when they want to sound like they know what they're talking about. Science.

We subtracted each film's budget from its worldwide box-office takings to get a rough idea of profitability, et voila!

Predictably, the big blockbusters win the day on profitability - all of the top ten are recognisable - but some of them really don't seem all that christmassy.

It's also interesting to note that none of the critic or audience favourites even broke the top ten, with the notable exception of La La Land, about which we will say no more.

At the other end of the scale, The Apartment, beloved by both critics and audiences, apparently made a whopping loss of over $25m.

Clearly, money alone was not the indisputable indicator of yuletide yumminess we had hoped for.

(Also, we couldn't actually find financial data for nearly half of our films, so it was a dead end anyway)

---

People People People?

We needed to rethink. If Christmas wasn't all about money, what else could it be?

Of course! Christmas is about family. And who are the family of a film, if not directors, writers and stars?

The next christmas morsel to feed our hungry data machine would be people. A lot of people.

In fact, across all of our movies, our intrepid data-hunters tracked down an impressive 159 directors and 276 writers, alongside a frankly ridiculous 7639 actors.

In it's raw state this data didn't reveal any obvious metrics we could use to reduce our watery stock of movies down to a thick, delicious Christmas gravy.

Perhaps a more thorough analysis would help, but first - more data!

---

Plot is the keyword.

Of course, what really makes a film pop or flop is the plot!

But how could we turn 91 movies' worth of storylines into a tasty data dish for our Christmas algorithmatron to devour?

The answer would lie in IMDB's 'plot keywords' feature.

We painstakingly recorded every plot keyword for each of our remaining films, discarding those that were only found once. We were left with a nice bitesized chunk of delicious data: 1795 keywords. Nom.

No big surprises at the top, but a nice clear-cut way to reduce our pile-o'-films a little further.

It ought to go without saying that to qualify for consideration in the Christmas film rankings, a film must feature Christmas. So we wave bye-bye to any festive fakers, they're outta here.

---

Running Total: 85

---

A taste for violence?

Further down the keyword rankings we find some... oddities.

During our exhaustive analysis, the data-elves couldn't help noticing a somewhat violent trend. In fact, we identified over 250 violent plot themes:

---

Incredibly, 61 of our 85 remaining titles had at least one of these fearsome flavours somewhere in the mix.

Whether it be murder, rampage or rocket launchers, clearly a good helping of violence is essential to keep us satisfied at Christmas!

---

A Runtime reduction

Our final nugget of data, for now, is runtime. Let's review the figures.

According to The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, any film under 40 minutes is classified as a 'short film'.

That's fine for them, but seriously, if you can't stick the kids in front of it and ignore them for a solid hour, what's even the point?

On that sound scientific basis, the only rational course of action was to cut anything under 60 minutes. And that's exactly what we did. Sorry Rudolph.

---

Running Total: 77

---

Section 5: Do it Your Elf

Which films are people actually watching? Incorporating novel festive pathways on the well-trodden route to the grotto of listing excellence.

---

Our feast of festive data dishes was nearly complete, but at 77 films, our list was still a smidge crowded.

However, looking at the remaining selection, some titles raised suspicion. Yes, they passed the Christmas keyword check, and yes they got the critics' approval, but...

Are any Brits in 2020 really tracking down a copy of Christmas in Connecticut (1945) for a festive funtime?

And for all that Tangerine (2015) may be undeniably fantastic; an "exuberantly raw and up-close portrait of one of Los Angeles' more distinctive sex-trade subcultures"; the question remains: is anyone really popping it on for a cosy crimbly afternoon in front of the telly?

Our hypothesis? Probably not.

Unfortunately we had no way of obtaining accurate viewing figures for our movies, but maybe we could do the next best thing. Enter Google Trends.

Handily, Google lets us compare the frequency of search terms in the UK over a given period.

To get a snapshot of which films folk actually want to watch around Christmas, we checked trends for all of our films between 14th - 28th December 2019.

To get comparable data, we had to compare each film against one benchmark - and for that honour we chose Elf (2003), because elves are totes christmassy. The North Pole ones, not the tall fighty ones. Just go with it.

We took the average score for each movie over the Christmas fortnight and returned it as a percentage of Elf's score for the same period. It sounds more complicated than it is, honest.

In fact it's so simple, while we were there we even found time to check the trends for our cousins across the pond too.

Observant readers may note that this method isn't without its pitfalls: there's no easy way to differentiate between duplicate films of the same title, since people are unlikely to search for a specific year when hunting down a stream of their festive fave.

That said, it's definitely interesting to note some taste differences between British and American googlers. Could this be indicative of deeper malaise, a worrying portent of a breakdown in anglo-american relations? Diplomats, take note.

And, more importantly, we have a new metric by which to shorten our list.

We can say with some confidence that films with an ElfScore of zero, though they may be critical darlings, are statistically unlikely to be the best Christmas movie of all time, and thus can be gleefully cast into the fireplace like so much used wrapping paper. Bye guys.

---

Running total: 51

---

Section 7: The Elf Report 2020 Definitive Scientifically-Ranked Ultimate Christmas Films List

We did it. We found the one true best christmas movie rankings list to end them all.

---

Let's recap: we started off with a list of 153 festive films, each ranked in the top 25 of 25 previously published 'best Christmas films' lists.

We assigned scores based on those initial rankings, and trimmed the lowest scoring movies.

We checked audience and critic's ratings and cut films rated below 50%.

We analysed our movies' storylines and dropped those that don't actually feature Christmas.

We discarded films less than an hour long.

And finally, we analysed people's search behaviour and got rid of the films that no-one's actually watching.

---

Running total: 51

---

With all of our highly methodical and scientific tinkering and filtering, we've finally whittled our list down to a not very elegant 51. And if there's one thing we know about science, it's that it's meant to be elegant.

And worse, somehow, despite all of our efforts, our list still includes a stirring musical romance that Tom Charity of Sight and Sound called "a rhapsody in blue, red, yellow and green". This cannot stand.

Yeet.

---

Final total: 50

---

The Christmas Algorithm

Our final hurdle is to decide which order we put these certified christmas crackers in. We've proved they're all good - but which is the best?

Luckily, we are BroadbandDeals.co.uk, and writing sophisticated algorithms to compare stuff and pick the best is sorta our forte. Not to toot our own Christmas horn or anything.

For instance:

Really, what could be simpler?

Section 8: A Very Merry Listmas

Conclusions and recommendations And the real meaning of Christmas was all the film trivia we learned along the way.

No-one ever said that definitively proving the best Christmas films of all time was going to be easy. Would we have done things differently if we'd known just how difficult it would be?

Perhaps. Perhaps. But we are scientists, and sometimes science is about sacrifice. Other times it is about really boring data entry. Sometimes both.

Anyway - let's review a few fun and festive things we learned along the way:

---

• The British Public are Liars.

A 2018 Radio Times survey of over 7000 Brits found that, It's a Wonderful Life was Britain's favourite Christmas film. In fact, the 1946 classic tale of suicide and second chances tops almost every similar list we could find.

But for all that the collective consciousness seems to have decided it's our fave, the fact is, very few people are actually trying to stream it around Christmas.

True, it could simply be that we all know it's guaranteed to be on telly, so we don't bother searching for it - but perhaps there's a more insidious explanation.

Could this be a mass cover-up to hide the embarrassing fact that we all just really love Macaulay Culkin?

In any case, our findings suggest that we're far more likely to turn to modern laugh-out-loud festive comedy than weepy sentimental classics.

---

• Literary Adaptation Showdown: Limeys vs Yanks.

Our study showed that the British and American taste for Christmas movies differs somewhat, with Brits favouring Home Alone  while Elf  leads the pack in the USA.

In the red-white-and-blue-sortof-criss-crossed corner, Charles Dickens is by far the most adapted writer - with no fewer than 10 adaptations of A Christmas Carol  in the top 100 films, raking in a cool $797 million at the box office.

But when it comes to the most successful Christmas literary adaptations, the also-red-white-and-blue-but-with-stars-and-stripes corner may have the upper hand.

Dr Seuss' How the Grinch Stole Christmas!  has only 3 adaptations, but blows Dickens out of the water with over $1 billion in inflation-adjusted worldwide box office.

---

• NowTV Wins Christmas Battle of the Streaming Services

We analysed the streamability of all of the top 50 best Christmas films and the results were somewhat surprising.

It may not be the most popular, or the cheapest, but at least as far as Christmas movies goes, NowTV's Sky Cinema Pass blows the competition out of the water.

Viewers looking for the ultimate curl-up and cosy-down are best advised to plump for the nestle-up-and-NOW experience rather than Netflix-and-chill this festive season.

---

Family, snow, dogs and... rocket launchers?

Our study of Christmas movie plot keywords found a bewildering array of ingredients that go into making the perfect Christmas film.

It was easy to predict that family relationships would feature prominently, and the fact that snow shows up in 41 of the best Christmas movies will surprise no-one.

Perhaps more surprising is the fact that dogs (27 films) feature almost as heavily as Santa (29 films), and that characters getting punched in the face (12 films) has been a consistent theme since as far back as 1944.

Rocket launchers appear in two christmas movies in the top 25, and murder in no fewer than 12 of our listed movies.

In all, a shocking 74% of our final top 50 deal with violent themes - proving that even (especially?) in the season of goodwill, there's nothing we love more than a good rampage.

---

And finally...

We have proved beyond doubt, using indisputable scientific methodology, backed with mountains of highest-quality data:

La La Land is not a good Christmas film.

---

Merry Christmas everyone.