The numbers are in
Welcome to the party, pal! Here, if it’s Christmas, that means it’s time to debate if Die Hard qualifies as a holiday movie or not. The Thanksgiving table has current events up for debate; Christmas has the 1988 action film starring Bruce Willis. To answer this question, a recent Yahoo/YouGov poll surveyed fans of the film and asked them their thoughts. The answer was surprisingly definitive, but does it echo what the cast and crew have to say?
Die Hard is an adaptation of Roderick Thorp’s 1979 novel called Nothing Lasts Forever. The action thriller takes place on Christmas Eve, a choice the movie remained faithful to despite some other drastic deviations. In the face of productions like Home Alone, some viewers wonder what it takes to be a holiday hit and if Die Hard has that special something. Here’s what the numbers had to say.
What counts as a Christmas movie? Not Die Hard, according to the recent polling. A whopping 50% of respondents said Die Hard is not a Christmas movie; that’s compared to only 26% who definitively believe it is, and 23% who said they’re unsure what to think of it.
Contrast this split ruling with the higher 34% who consider Home Alone a must-see for their every holiday season. Similarly, 33% of poll participants make a point of watching A Christmas Story every single winter. Following a similar line of questioning, only 14% of people said they have a tradition of watching Die Hard during the winter holidays.
Does the team behind the film agree?
If you ask action icon Bruce Willis, he would agree with the majority saying Die Hard isn’t a holiday classic. “Die Hard is not a Christmas movie,” he declared during a 2018 Comedy Central bit.”It’s a Bruce Willis movie so yippee-ki-yay to all you motherf—ers and good night.”
But just a year before this, co-writer Steven E. de Souza claimed just the opposite. He responded to a tweet that reads, “@StevenEdeSouzaI ’m sure you e weighed in on it before, but I’ve never heard you or Jeb Stuart offer your take on whether Die Hard is a Christmas movie” by saying, “Yes, because the studio rejected the Purim draft.” This is in reference to the Jewish holiday that takes place in late March and was probably in jest, but left the door open just enough for the debate to endure.
Die Hard hit theaters on July 15, 1988, however, and being a summer action flick adds weight to the argument against its inclusion in the library of Christmas films. Yahoo UK has a handy litmus test, though, that may clear things up. It proposes that if watching the movie at any other time than Christmas doesn’t feel weird, then it’s not exclusively a Christmas movie. It also asks how much the film makes sense – or doesn’t – if Christmas were to be taken out of the movie.
Die Hard features quite a few beloved jingles even outside of the film’s holiday party that got all the major players together. But with these factors in mind, is it enough to call Die Hard a Christmas movie?
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