Christmas at Pemberly Manor and Romance at Reindeer Lodge may never make it to Oscar night, but legions of fans still love these sweet-yet-predictable holiday movies—and this season, the AP reports that many are making pilgrimages to where their favorite scenes were filmed. Connecticut—the location for at least 22 holiday films by Hallmark, Lifetime, and others—is promoting tours of the quaint Christmas-card cities and towns featured in this booming movie market; places where a busy corporate lawyer can return home for the holidays and cross paths with a plaid shirt-clad former high school flame who now runs a Christmas tree farm. (Spoiler alert: they live happily ever after.)
"It's exciting—just to know that something was in a movie and we actually get to see it," said Abby Rumfelt of Morganton, North Carolina, after stepping off a bus in Wethersfield, Connecticut, at one of the stops on the holiday movie tour. Rumfelt was among 53 people, mostly women, on a recent weeklong "Hallmark Movie Christmas Tour," organized by Mayfield Tours from Spartanburg, South Carolina. On the bus, fans watched the matching movies as they rode from stop to stop. To plan the tour, co-owner Debbie Mayfield used the "Connecticut Christmas Movie Trail" map, which was launched by the wintry state last year to cash in on the growing Christmas-movie craze. She included hotel accommodations, some meals, tickets, and even a stop to see the Rockettes in New York City. It sold out in two weeks.
In 2006, five years after the launch of the Hallmark Channel, Hallmark "struck gold" with the romance movie The Christmas Card, said Joanna Wilson, author of the book Tis the Season TV. "Hallmark saw those high ratings and then started creating that format and that formula with the tropes, and it now has become their dominant formula that they create for their Christmas TV romances," she said.
The holiday movie industry, estimated to generate hundreds of millions of dollars a year, has expanded beyond Hallmark and Lifetime. Today, a mix of cable and broadcast networks, streaming platforms, and direct-to-video producers release roughly 100 new films annually, Wilson said. The genre has also diversified, with characters from a wider range of racial and ethnic backgrounds as well as LGBTQ+ storylines. The formula, however, remains the same. And fans still have an appetite for a G-rated love story. "They want to see people coming together. They want to see these romances. It's a part of the hope of the season," Wilson said. "Who doesn't love love? And it always has a predictable, happy ending."
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