This Is The Best Christmas Movie Of All Time

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published Nov 27, 8:27AM EST

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This Is The Best Christmas Movie Of All Time — © Courtesy of RKO Radio Pictures

The Christmas holiday has often been a lucrative period for movies. Movies like “Sherlock Holmes” (2009) have done particularly well, as people with a few days off flock to theaters. But, there are two kinds of Christmas movies, and those released on Christmas are one of these. The other is films made about Christmas that usually aren’t released on Christmas at all.

24/7 Tempo 24/7 Tempo has identified the best Christmas movie ever made based on critics and audiences movie ratings on Rotten Tomatoes and user rating on Internet Movie Database

Among those we considered, there is a type of holiday film for everyone. Numerous genres are represented, ranging from action to comedy, romance, and horror. There are at least some surprises.

For example, “Die Hard” is not make our list of finalists and “Iron Man 3” is. (Bruce Willis has insisted “Die Hard” is not a Christmas movie, so we omitted it, and Marvel has officially declared the third installment of the Iron Man franchise is, so we included it.)

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Among the movies we considered there is an almost perfect split between older and newer films — 23 of the 45 movies on the list were released after 2000. The older holiday flicks were released between 1938 and the late 1990s, and most of them are ranked in the top 20 of the best Christmas movies ever.

The best Christman movie ever made is It’s A Wonderful Life (1946). Here are the details:

> IMDb user rating: 8.6/10 (422,428 votes)
> Rotten Tomatoes audience score: 95% (219,179 votes)
> Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer score: 94% (87 reviews)
> Directed by: Frank Capra

Methodology: To determine the best Christmas movie ever made, 24/7 Tempo developed an index using average ratings on IMDb, an online movie database owned by Amazon, and a combination of audience scores and Tomatometer scores on Rotten Tomatoes, an online movie and TV review aggregator, as of November 2021. All ratings were weighted equally. Only movies with at least 25,000 audience votes on either IMDb or Rotten Tomatoes were considered. Only films in which the Christmas season plays an important role in the plot, or were otherwise identified as Christmas movies by Box Office Mojo, the Countdown Until Christmas Christmas movie database, and Vulture magazine were considered. Information on directorial credits comes from IMDb.

Click here to read The Best Christmas Movies Of All Time

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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.