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Is Die Hard a Christmas movie? The world ranks it the best one

3 November 2026 · Movies

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Every December the same argument comes back to dinner tables and group chats: is Die Hard a Christmas movie? On GOATvs nobody votes on that question directly. People simply pick one film over another, two at a time, and the world's ranking of movies comes out of those choices. But when you take the Christmas films on the site and put them in the order the world has voted them, the answer is hard to miss. The film at the top of the list is Die Hard. The box above shows where it and the season's other favourites stand today.

The case against is easy to make. Die Hard opened in American cinemas in July 1988, in the middle of summer, as an action film. Nobody sings carols, nobody learns the true meaning of anything, and most of the plot is a New York cop, John McClane, crawling through air ducts in a Los Angeles office tower full of armed men. Bruce Willis himself joined the doubters: at his televised roast in 2018 he announced, to big laughs, that it is not a Christmas movie.

The case for is just as easy. The whole film takes place on Christmas Eve. McClane flies west to spend the holidays with his wife and children, and the gunmen led by Hans Gruber, played by Alan Rickman, take over her company's Christmas party. Run-DMC's "Christmas in Hollis" plays in the limousine, there are fairy lights and wrapping tape, and the closing credits roll over "Let It Snow". The screenwriter, Steven E. de Souza, has long said it is a Christmas film, and for the film's 30th anniversary in 2018 the studio cut a trailer selling it as one.

The world's own pick puts it at the head of a list full of films that stand on both sides of that line. Home Alone, the most obvious rival, is a family comedy about a boy left behind over Christmas, and it is the film most often put up against Die Hard. The box above shows how the world splits when the two meet face to face. It's a Wonderful Life, Frank Capra's 1946 film that flopped at the box office and only became a holiday tradition decades later on television, sits just below them.

Die Hard also has company from its own genre. Lethal Weapon, written by Shane Black, opens to "Jingle Bell Rock" and is set at Christmas; so is Black's Kiss Kiss Bang Bang. Die Hard 2 brought McClane back for another Christmas Eve, at an airport this time. Gremlins begins with a Christmas present, and Batman Returns is set in a snowy Gotham in the days before Christmas. Even horror and fairy tale join in: The Nightmare Before Christmas is argued over by both Halloween and Christmas fans.

Then there are the films nobody has to argue about. John Hughes wrote National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation in 1989 and Home Alone a year later, and both still rank high. Elf, with Will Ferrell as a human raised by elves at the North Pole, is, at the time of writing, the highest of the films made this century, and Love Actually, Richard Curtis's story of London in the weeks before Christmas, still divides the room. Which of the two the world prefers is in the box above.

You can see all of the Christmas movies on GOATvs in one place, in the world's order, on our list of the best Christmas movies of all time. It changes every day, and Christmas is still weeks away. If you think a film that opened in July has no business at the top, vote it down.

Vote: Die Hard vs Home Alone

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