Over the past couple of years, Netflix has been encroaching on the Hallmark Channel’s holiday season chokehold.
Writer Russell Hainline is no stranger to the Christmas movie, having penned several titles for Hallmark, including The Santa Summit and In Merry Measure. This week he debuted his first Netflix entry, the delightfully named, Hot Frosty.
The movie stars Hallmark company player Lacey Chabert as Kathy, a widow and beloved local who wraps a magical scarf around a sculpted snowman with an eight-pack who becomes a real — and very naked — man named Jack. Hijinks ensue with naive and preternaturally good-natured Jack (Dustin Milligan) being ogled by the local women and helping plan the high school’s winter formal, all the while being pursued by the cops for the initial display of public indecency. The film has earned an overwhelmingly positive critical response and is currently sitting at Netflix’s No. 1 most-streamed movie in the U.S.
Ahead of the release of Hot Frosty, The Hollywood Reporter talked to Hainline about coming up with Hot Frosty, the joke that didn’t make the final cut and keeping cynicism out of the holidays: “Irony is a safety net. These movies should exist without that safety net.”
How did the idea for Hot Frosty come about?
Sometimes you like to, as a writer, come up with pitches that make your friends laugh, that make you laugh, that you never think will actually come to fruition. One of the ones that always got a laugh was: What if Frosty the Snowman came to life and, instead of a snowman, he was a super hot dude? Everyone I told would almost always reply: Yeah, that should be a movie. So, I thought about pitching it but I was afraid if I pitched it that, throughout the process, it would sort of get watered down into something a little more milquetoast. I wanted it to be funny, for my snowman not to immediately just become some fantasy man, but to have the naïveté and innocence of someone born yesterday. I wanted it to be a little sexier, just a pinch raunchier. He comes into the world naked, as we all do. So, I wrote a spec [script]. I fully assumed I was just doing it for myself, making something that you know I love and that nobody would really want to make. I wrote it during the pandemic, when my anxiety was very high, and writing something like this provided me some joy. And here we are years later. yeah, and obviously, here we are years later.
Did you pitch the script around town?
I got optioned by [production company] Muse, who really took up for it and really loved it as it was. I know that some people who read it saw the title and immediately said, “Not interested.”
And those people were wrong.
To me, it’s insane, right? The title is part of what makes it fun, and luckily, we had an advocate at Netflix who really loved the script and took up the cause himself. At a time when places are a bit more risk-averse seeing the title Hot Frosty on the front page was maybe at times, an impediment, but luckily not for particular people that we worked with at Netflix.
Were you nervous the title would change over the production process?
I was nervous every day. I think that having the talent really loving the title helped a lot. I can’t believe I’m talking about the title Hot Frosty in the year 2024.
The title and the premise are so fun already but was there any gag that didn’t make it into the movie that was hard to see go?
This is insane but there was a joke about the movie The Two Popes. When Craig [Robinson] and Joe [Truglio] have all the pictures on the board — the classic board of suspects — he had a picture of Anthony Hopkins up there from Silence of the Lambs. And Joe Truglio would say, “Oh, he was so good in The Two Popes. Did you see that? He was one of the two Popes!” And Craig would go, “Of course, he was one of the two Popes! You don’t make a movie about two Popes and cast Anthony Hopkins and not have him as one of the two Popes!” I was hoping that because this is a Netflix movie and The Two Popes was on Netflix, we could get this Two Popes gag in. Turns out that rights get complicated and these things are above my pay grade.
The movie has its fun but your lead character, Cathy, is a widow and dealing with the grief of losing her husband. While Jack is faced with his own mortality constantly and life’s impermanence because, yes, he is a snowman. These are very intense themes.
I think it’s easy to imagine a one-note joke version of the movie that doesn’t approach the premise with sincerity or get the audience to care. I think it’s also easy to imagine the romance novel version that doesn’t have as much fun with the inherent comedy of the premise. I’m a big believer in sincerity in movies in general. I think there’s a sincerity in the tone of Christmas movies that often gets accused of being cheesy — and sometimes certainly an audience member might be correct in assessing it that way — but I find myself increasingly disinterested in movies that constantly wink at the camera, or characters that constantly make ironic, self-reflexive quips. These movies lean into the sincerity in a way that, again, maybe people might wave their hand and call corny, but irony is a safety net. These movies should exist without that safety net. They’re unabashedly what they are. That’s why so many people do tend to love them.
Hot Frosty isn’t your first holiday movie. You have written several for Hallmark. How did you get into making holiday movies?
I grew up on genre movies — aliens, monsters, disaster movies, creature features, anything that I could watch on cable with my brother, basically. So when I moved to L.A., that’s what I set out to do. You know, thrillers, sci-fi, horror, action. I wrote some specs and took some meetings. I got one thriller made for Lifetime, but I wasn’t really getting the traction that I wanted. My anxiety was building through that presidency and as the pandemic was getting started and, frankly, I got tired of sitting around all day thinking of creative ways of killing people. I think a friend must have mentioned to me that they knew someone who makes these [holiday movies] and I thought, “Sure, I’ll give it a spin.” I knew nothing about Christmas movies. I knew nothing about this world and, in very early 2020, I wrote a Christmas movie about a boy and a reindeer that was very much inspired by my rescue Pitbull that I had. I had a lot of fun writing it and it felt really good to write — to have it be about good people who try their best and everything works out. I told a friend of mine from college Ito Aghayere, who is a great actress, [about the script] not realizing that she was friends with Jack Grossbart, who’s a producer who has made a ton of Hallmark Christmas movies. She put me in touch with Jack, and Jack took me under his wing and helped me get my first movie made at Hallmark.
What have you learned while working in the space?
I admire the way that they operate as a studio. At a time when there’s a lot of discourse out there about whether movie stars exist, Hallmark creates its own in a very old school way. A long time ago, you knew that when you’d see a Warner Brothers movie, you’re gonna see Jimmy Cagney or Bette Davis or Lauren Bacall. Hallmark has its own faces, now. They make a ton of movies, just like studios used to do back in the day, so tons of actors get their shots and audiences build connections to these people and to these characters and to these worlds. At a time when it seems like movie studios are making fewer movies and much, much bigger budget movies and star power feels like it’s less important than things like IP and CGI, here is a studio that makes a bunch of movies every year. They’re low-budget and they’re character-driven. I feel like there are lessons to be learned there.
A comparison that I like to make is Star Trek. I feel like most people might not know who the stars are, or might not have heard of all of these characters, but there are people who will line up for hours at conventions and pay good money to meet these people. There are people who run fan pages. There’s the Hallmark Christmas cruise going on right now. It’s incredibly humbling. Just because it’s not something that everybody universally understands doesn’t mean that there’s not this intensely devoted pocket of fans for whom these movies mean the absolute world.
Hot Frosty is currently streaming on Netflix.
