As 2022 draws to a close and the holidays approach, there is a resurge in demand for Christmas-related content. Traditionally in the US, the Christmas atmosphere begins to slowly take place after Thanksgiving. The period between Thanksgiving and Christmas is filled with new Christmas movies and series.
When it comes to Christmas titles for streaming platforms, the biggest name this year is Disney+’s original show The Santa Clauses, released on Nov. 16th. This show is part of the The Santa Clause franchise, which also includes three movies released between 1994 and 2006 and starring Tim Allen. The Disney+ series serves as a sequel to the last movie The Santa Clause 3: The Escape Clause, and has been very successful so far in the US. The average demand for The Santa Clauses since its release is 16.23x times the demand for the average show, a number that less than 2.7% of the movies released in that market reach.
If we take a look at the demand for Disney+ originals in November and December (until Dec. 12th), The Santa Clauses managed to carve out a place in the top 10 most in-demand Disney+ originals, as the 8th most in-demand show. That show is also the only one in the ranking that is not part of either the Marvel or the Star Wars franchise, an impressive mark considering the number of highly in-demand IP-based shows that come from Disney+.
Often one of the main goals of a company when it releases a sequel is to reignite the demand for older elements of the franchise. With The Santa Clauses it seems that Disney has been succeeding when it comes to this goal. The demand for the three movies of the franchise began to rise a few days before the series' premiere and experienced additional spikes after each newly released episode. If we compare the average demand one week prior to The Santa Clauses premiere with the average demand between Dec. 6th and Dec. 12th, we see that the demand for The Santa Clause 2 grew 285.5%, for The Santa Clause 165.4%, and for The Santa Clause 3: The Escape Clause 114.7%, the last movie and the least in-demand of the franchise in the last week.
It’s expected that Christmas-related titles will experience a surge in demand the closer the holidays get. The chart below presents that the growth in demand for movies from the Santa Clause franchise has been higher in 2022 than in the same period in previous years, especially around episode release dates (with the exception of the episodes released on Nov. 30th), indicating that the Disney+ show has been contributing to the movies from this franchise reaching levels higher levels of demand. Shortly after the release of Chapter 5 of the show on Dec. 7th, the average demand for the three movies from the franchise reached 11.7x the demand for the average movie, a number not reached in the last years.
