The World’s Favorite Christmas Movies, Mapped

The start of the holiday season means it’s time to recommence the annual debate over which Christmas movies are the best. If you’re discussing the matter with a friend from France or Brazil, they might be arguing hard for Gremlins, the 1984 cult classic that may or may not actually be a Christmas movie. India, on the other hand, is home to many fans of 2000’s How the Grinch Stole Christmas.

Those trends come from a new study by broadband experts at UK-based online comparison site money.co.uk. Basically, they analyzed Google search data for 30 Christmas movies across 18 countries to see how holiday viewership differs from nation to nation. All the films included in the study are relatively mainstream, so you won’t find Rankin/Bass’s Nestor, The Long-Eared Christmas Donkey (1977) anywhere on the map.

What you will find is Elf, the 2003 comedy starring Will Ferrell as an overlarge Santa’s helper navigating Manhattan. Considering that the film is the apparent favorite of viewers in Scotland, Wales, Ireland, Canada, and South Africa, it seems that Ferrell’s absurdist humor isn’t just funny to U.S. residents. Love Actually (2003) also ranked first in five countries, including England, Spain, and Norway. But neither Love Actually nor Elf clinched the top spot in the U.S. The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993) did, with an average monthly search volume of nearly 3.7 million.

The search data used in the study is from October through December of last year, which might explain why Last Christmas landed in first place in Germany. The romantic comedy, starring Emilia Clarke and Henry Golding, premiered in 2019 to generally poor reviews, so it’s possible that Germans won’t be Googling it quite so often this year.

See the map below, and learn more about the survey here.