Warner Bros. may be putting a solid contender in the annual competition for the worst Christmas movie if the official trailer for 8-Bit Christmas is anything to go by. Picture the kid from Jingle All The Way having to embark upon a wacky adventure to find himself the perfect toy for Christmas, told through a How I Met Your Mother-style framing device, and you’re pretty much there.
The trailer sees Neil Patrick Harris narrating a story from one of his childhood winters, in which he and a group of friends compete to win an original NES for Christmas. After all, what could be more festive than a brand-new video game console? And no global chip shortages in sight! Bliss.
As far as I’m concerned, outside of a small handful of bonafide classics like It’s a Wonderful Life and Elf (and no, I will not be engaging with the “is Die Hard a Christmas movie?” discourse), films focused on Christmas are uniformly terrible. But isn’t that the point? I don’t think anyone is looking for a cinematic masterpiece when December 25th rolls around. They’re looking for the vaguest of background noise to draw their attention away from the gnawing sensation that they just might have overdone it on the food. Or maybe that’s just me.
8-Bit Christmas is streaming on HBO Max starting November 24th. If you’d like to get into the festive spirit early, please enjoy this short clip of a child losing his goddamn mind opening a Nintendo 64.
