Ben Affleck’s Christmas Movie Considered “The Worst of All Time” Returns to Streaming for the Holidays

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When it comes to Christmas movies, audiences tend to fall into one of two camps: those who watch It’s a Wonderful Life and cry every time, and those who want something a little more chaotic and, dare we say, rubbish. Ben Affleck’s Surviving Christmas sits firmly in the latter camp — and nearly 20 years after its disastrous debut, the film is back on Paramount+ to spread some messy, misguided holiday cheer. Originally released in 2004 and widely panned upon arrival, Surviving Christmas has long been dubbed one of the “worst Christmas movies ever made.”

On paper, Surviving Christmas had all the ingredients of a seasonal hit. Affleck stars as Drew Latham, a wealthy but lonely ad executive who realizes he has no one to spend the holidays with. When his girlfriend Missy (Jennifer Morrison) asks about his family, he decides to return to his childhood home — only to find a new family living there. So, naturally, he offers them a hefty sum of money to let him move in and play “son” for Christmas.

The family — headed by the perpetually grumpy Tom Valco (James Gandolfini) and his long-suffering wife Christine (Catherine O’Hara) — reluctantly agrees. Their daughter Alicia (Christina Applegate) and teenage son Brian (Josh Zuckerman) round out the cast. Critics complained about its uneven tone — swinging wildly between slapstick farce and forced sentimentality — while audiences mostly stayed home.

Why Was ‘Surviving Christmas’ So Dramatic?

The story behind Surviving Christmas’ failure is almost more dramatic than the film itself. Production was delayed multiple times amid reports of creative clashes and script rewrites. According to the New York Post, Gandolfini was so unhappy with early drafts that he refused to leave his trailer until the screenplay was reworked.

By the time Surviving Christmas wrapped, it faced another problem: release scheduling. DreamWorks, which produced the film, postponed its planned December 2003 debut to avoid competing with Affleck’s Paycheck. When another studio announced a similarly themed film (Christmas with the Kranks), Surviving Christmas was hastily moved to October 2004, an absolutely abysmal time to open a Christmas movie, and the result was a $4.4 million opening weekend and a swift exit from theaters. DreamWorks rushed the film to DVD just two months later in an effort to salvage sales before the holiday season ended. Still didn’t work.

Surviving Christmas is now streaming on Paramount+.