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One film’s success sort of threw me last December: Netflix’s latest Christmas week release, The Six Triple Eight.
On the one hand, it did well. Of the 416 first-run films that have made the Nielsen top ten since March of 2020, it ranks 23rd, or the fifth percentile of all films. That’s damn good. Netting 51.2 million hours in four weeks is a great number.
On the other hand, context matters. And The Six Triple Eight was, to borrow the analogy, born on third base. Typically, Netflix films that come out the week before Christmas have done well. Not just a little better either: films like Glass Onion: A Benoit Blanc Mystery and Don’t Look Up are some of Netflix’s biggest films of all time, specifically, the first and fifth biggest films according to Nielsen. Meanwhile, The Midnight Sky got a Netflix datecdote that 72 million households watched at least two minutes back in 2020, one of their biggest openings at the time. Same for Encanto and Soul on Disney+.
As I’ve long written, Christmas is the new sweeps.
Not just Christmas, but all holiday weekends. Here’s the top 16 first-run films, with holiday films color-coded in green:
You may notice that some of those titles are pretty old now. In the last few years, the “Holiday weekend” streaming viewership bump seems to have disappeared.
I bring this up because the streamers went all out for the fourth of July, including…
- The Old Guard 2 on Netflix, starring Charlize Theron, KiKi Layne, Henry Golding, Uma Thurman and Chiwetel Ejiofor. I couldn’t find a budget, but it doesn’t look cheap.
- Heads of State on Prime Video, starring Idris Elba, John Cena, and Priyanka Chopra, and this action film also does not look cheap.
- Sinners on
MaxHBO Max, the biggest original movie of 2025 at the domestic box office. If you hadn’t heard of this one…where have you been? - Dora and the Search for Sol Dorado on Paramount+, a live-action version of one of the biggest kids properties on Nickelodeon.
None of these big time films broke 20 million hours of viewership in their first week, meaning none joined the all-time film rankings or became one of the 44 biggest streaming debuts since 2020, another sign the “holiday weekend bump” may be fading. So let’s dig into that question, updating our numbers on Christmas films and holiday weekends, and also analyze these four big new releases.
The Six Triple Eight and the Decline of Christmas Season Films
Let’s start with the data on films released during Christmas, meaning the week of the year that has 24 or 25-December in it. (I’m using mostly Nielsen data to make this comparison, since that data set goes back the longest.)
Here’s the list, arranged chronologically:
See the shift? Back in 2020 to 2022, Christmas films dominated, but that domination has ebbed over the last two years.
But that’s not the whole story! If we zoom out to all of December, suddenly the big hits return:
So it’s not like we didn’t have big December films over the last two years, because we did! Carry-On is the biggest film through four weeks on the Nielsen charts, and Red One is one of the biggest theatrical-to-streaming films in our data set, too. Leave the World Behind in 2023 also set records, but it came out early in December, not on Christmas. If anything, that helps these films open well, then they can benefit from a Christmas week bump.
But guess what, it’s not just Christmas…
Holiday Weekends Can Drive Big Viewership
Looking at the data, we’ve actually seen that three weekends can help boost a film’s fortunes:
- Fourth of July
- Thanksgiving
- Christmas break.
Here are those weekends in the table above, and that adds Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F, which was one of the top films of 2024.
Now, I’ve been using the first week of data because that’s what we’d expect to see a bump during holiday weekends. Still, if you want four weeks of viewership, here’s that chart, with the caveat that films like The Irishman, Hamilton and Wonder Woman 1984 didn’t have four weeks of data since Nielsen only provided datecdotes for those films after their opening weeks:
2025’s Fourth of July Films Disappointed
So let’s dive into the specific films that came out for this year’s Fourth of July weekend in America.
The surprise winner was…
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