Netflix's Christmas movie universe is the new MCU as they're all connected
Netflix has been cornering the market in recent years for original Christmas movies, and it turns out that they're more complex than we realised.
There is now officially a Netflix Christmas movie universe – AKA Netflix's Holiday Movie Universe – that already has eight movies involved in it. It's basically the Marvel Cinematic Universe, but with festive feels.
But if you think it's just a simple case of them all taking place in the same universe, think again. The MCU wishes it was this multi-layered and complex.
Welcome to Netflix’s Holiday Movie Universe, an interconnected world of eight films (and counting) where anyone could become a princess and your soulmate may be hiding in plain sight — or the past!
Here’s actually how these holiday faves became so entwined... pic.twitter.com/5uNjEknHac— Netflix US (@netflix) December 6, 2019
Let's start with the movies that are involved in the Netflix Christmas movie universe (the NCMU, for short). They are:
A Christmas Prince
A Christmas Prince: The Royal Wedding
A Christmas Prince: The Royal Baby
The Holiday Calendar
The Knight Before Christmas
Christmas Inheritance
The Princess Switch
Holiday in the Wild
That's not every single Netflix Christmas movie they've released, but they are the ones that have been made by MPCA, and bringing all the movies together stemmed from needing a movie to show within The Holiday Calendar.
"It felt like a natural fit to show one of our other films available on Netflix," explained Amanda Phillips Atkins, EVP at MPCA. "That one seed of an idea soon turned into a fun opportunity to tie the various worlds together with small Easter eggs from movie to movie."
The movie shown within The Holiday Calendar was Christmas Inheritance, which also pops up in The Princess Switch.
So it seems that, like Quentin Tarantino movies, there are two universes in the NCMU: a real world and a fictional movie world, the movies that the people in the real world would go and see at the cinema (or on Netflix).
The fictional universe would include Christmas Inheritance, A Christmas Prince and Holiday in the Wild, with the other movies taking place in the real world.
Simple enough, right? WRONG.
There's also another mini universe in the NCMU that revolves around the Christmas Prince trilogy, The Princess Switch and The Knight Before Christmas. A Christmas Prince is set in Aldovia, The Princess Switch is set in Belgravia and The Knight Before Christmas is set in America, and they are all definitely set in the same world.
In The Knight Before Christmas, the acorn from A Christmas Prince appears as Brooke's sister Madison reveals to her daughter that her parents visited Aldovia. Then in the third A Christmas Prince movie, it's revealed that Aldovia and Belgravia are near each other.
"We planned to branch out from just having our characters watch each other on TV," Atkins added. "We thought it would be a great opportunity to build out a whole universe, not just for Aldovia, but for the whole world of our Christmas movies."
The thing is that A Christmas Prince appears as a movie in The Princess Switch, so in the world of The Princess Switch is it actually a documentary?
And A Christmas Prince also appears as a movie in The Holiday Calendar, meaning that the only movie in the NCMU that seems to takes place in the real world is The Holiday Calendar, and there are two fictional worlds:
Fictional world 1: A Christmas Prince trilogy, The Princess Switch, The Knight Before Christmas
Fictional world 2: Christmas Inheritance (appears on TV in The Princess Switch), Holiday in the Wild (appears on TV in The Knight Before Christmas)
Nice and straightforward.
But wait, we hear you say, Vanessa Hudgens appears in The Princess Switch and The Knight Before Christmas, so surely Brooke in The Knight Before Christmas would be freaked out that there's a Princess of Belgravia that looks exactly like her.
We have a theory there.
The Princess Switch sequel Switched Again will add another Vanessa Hudgens into the mix, with her playing three roles. What if this third role is actually Brooke from The Knight Before Christmas?
Mind. Blown.
Quite where 2020's Operation Christmas Drop, about a politician and an Air Force captain who clash over an air base closure (before inevitably falling in love), fits into the NCMU remains to be seen.
One thing is clear though: move over Avengers, there's a new shared universe in town.
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