Every year at this time we get a new crop of holiday themed movies that are looking to attract viewers and potentially become staples of the genre. Usually, those movies meet with limited success, but there's already one clear hit that could very easily enter the holiday movie rotation of millions, Hulu's Happiest Season. The new movie starring Kristen Stewart and Mackenzie Davis has received rave reviews from critics and fans alike, and the now writer/director Clea Duvall is thanking everybody for giving the film such overwhelming support.
Happiest Season isn't just a solid hit in its own right, but it is, without question, one of the biggest movies ever produced on Hulu. It was this news that Clea Duvall was reacting to when she took to Twitter to thank everybody who gave the same-sex romance a look.
Happiest Season has been the most talked about movie since it dropped on Hulu just prior to Thanksgiving. Perhaps the lack of theatrical competition helped the movie get noticed, but it seems quite clear that this was a movie that people wanted to see. The film follows a gay couple played by Kristen Stewart and Mackenzie Davis, who go to visit the family of Davis' character for the holidays. The only issues is that the family still doesn't know their daughter is gay, and so that fact is kept hidden throughout the visit.
At it's core, Happiest Season fits into the holiday movie mold nicely, but it tells the story of a same sex romance rather than a heterosexual one. This key difference was a big part of what attracted an all-star cast to the project, which only helped the movie get noticed.
Seeing a movie like Happiest Season get such a positive response and become the biggest "opening weekend" movie for Hulu is certainly a big deal. Hulu has always been the streaming service focused on TV, and original content in general has never been a massive selling point of the service, even though Hulu has certainly seen popular original products before. Perhaps Happiest Season's success could be the first of several original films that could end up on the platform, making movies in general a bigger part of the service, and giving it a better opportunity to compete with all the other streaming services in that category.
Of course, as a holiday movie, the bigger question for Happiest Season might be what happens with it a year from now. Will this be a movie that becomes a "Christmas Classic" with people returning to it every year alongside their annual rewatch of It's a Wonderful Life? The possibility is certainly there. Perhaps several years from now people will be watching Happiest Season for the first time and not even realizing what a massive hit and a unique film it was back in 2020.
