Starring in a Christmas movie is becoming a lucrative career pivot

On a cold and rainy night in November, over 2,000 people trekked to a nondescript arena on Long Island for some Christmas cheer.

They were there for the Great American Family Christmas Festival, an event put on by the cable TV network of the same name. For five weekends, the festival transformed the UBS Arena into a holiday wonderland complete with ice skating, fire pits, igloos, $20 spiked cider, and obviously, Santa.

But the main draw on opening night was an appearance from former "Full House" star and current GAF mainstay Candace Cameron Bure, who was on hand to light the Christmas tree and greet her fans, who paid anywhere from $15 to $249 for the experience.

"It's not about standing in line to get an autograph from a celebrity. We're just there to enhance the family experience," Bure told Business Insider over the phone in December. "It's really a place to come with your family and friends and feel like you're in a little Christmas movie."

She would know. With over 15 holiday movies to her name across Hallmark and GAF and a role as chief creative officer at GAF's parent company Great American Media, Bure has built her second act at the center of the Christmas movie industrial complex. After years of laying the groundwork, business is booming: Variety reported in 2022 that Bure was making around $1 million a year for her exclusive Hallmark deal before she joined ex-Hallmark boss Bill Abbott's relaunch of Great American Family that year for a sum reported to be "nearly double that."

Bure got in on the ground floor of what was once a cottage industry, providing a blueprint for other actors looking to reinvigorate their careers and make some relatively fast money while spreading holiday cheer. Others have followed suit: "Mean Girls" star Lacey Chabert has spent more than a decade building her career as one of Hallmark's — and now Netflix's — leading holiday ladies; erstwhile teen heartthrob Chad Michael Murray likes working on Christmas movies for their relative stability while raising a family; Lindsay Lohan returned to acting with her first major film role in years in the 2022 Netflix Christmas movie "Falling for Christmas" (she followed it up with another one, "Our Little Secret," in 2024).

In an industry that's constantly in flux, the holiday movie's heartwarming tried-and-true formula can be as comforting to actors looking for steady work as it is to audiences watching at home on their couches. Christmas comes every year, after all.

Candace Cameron Bure set the blueprint as one of the original queens of Christmas

Bure's reign as the queen of Christmas started more than a decade after the end of "Full House" with the 2008 Hallmark Christmas movie "Moonlight and Mistletoe." At the time, Bure wasn't thinking about being the queen of anything — she was just grateful for a job.

After taking a self-imposed hiatus from Hollywood to have children and build a family — she called it her "10-year retirement" — holiday movies provided Bure a relatively gentle runway back into the working world.

As far as jobs in Hollywood go, acting in a Christmas movie is a fairly predictable and stable gig: The typical made-for-TV holiday movie has a 15-day shoot that takes place over three weeks. While the days are long, it's still far less of a time commitment than a feature film, which can shoot for several months, or a multi-cam sitcom like "Full House," which had Bure rehearsing an entire week before filming a single 30-minute episode in front of a live audience.

Bure's timing was also auspicious: It was the start of Hallmark's golden era, when Abbott, then the head of Hallmark's parent company Crown Media, would go on to launch the network's genre-defining Countdown to Christmas campaign. By Bure's fourth or fifth Christmas movie, she realized it would be wise to refocus her career around her newfound holiday niche.

"Realizing that the numbers were successful, the viewership's successful, and it was a growing genre was like, 'OK, this is a great little pocket to stay in,'" Bure told BI.

Since then, Bure has starred in dozens more Hallmark movies, including more than 10 Christmas titles, before leaving the network to join Abbott at GAF in 2022, where's she starring in and producing films under her Candy Rock Entertainment banner.

Though Bure wouldn't share numbers with BI, she acknowledged that she's "very, very pleased" with how her pay has grown since her "Moonlight and Mistletoe" days.

"It's 15 years of work in the genre," she said, "and just like anyone's salary and their value, it goes up."

Pay for actors is solid — and there's plenty of opportunity

Even for actors who didn't get in on the ground floor like Bure, a pivot to Christmasland can be a smart career move. The entertainment industry, ever an unstable business, is in a particularly volatile era due to the 2023 Hollywood strikes, which won some benefits and protections for actors and writers but also led to declining production, resulting in fewer jobs and budget cuts.

Yet the market for original holiday movies is only growing. Lisa Hamilton Daly, the executive vice president of programming at Hallmark Media, said in an email statement to BI that 2024 was the company's biggest holiday season yet, with over 40 new movies debuting across its two networks and streaming service. It's a significant increase since Countdown to Christmas officially launched in 2009 with only four movies on the Hallmark Channel.

It's not just Hallmark, either. More networks and streamers are hopping on the holiday bandwagon than ever before. Abbott, the former Hallmark executive who now heads Great American Family, called the rapid growth in the space remarkable. "Everybody's seeing what we were involved with early on and now the appetite for the viewer to experience Christmas in an entertainment way is almost insatiable," he said.

For actors, appearing in a Christmas movie can provide "an element of financial security," said Jennifer Goldhar, the owner of Characters Talent Agency. Goldhar's company is based in Canada, where many Christmas movies are filmed, and many working Canadian actors make them their day-to-day livelihoods. She said a conservative midrange estimate for a holiday movie lead's salary — not a tentpole figure like Bure or Lacey Chabert, who command a lot more — is $150,000. Not exactly a blockbuster star-level payday, but still a solid payout for what's usually only a three-week commitment.

Sarah Ramos, an actor who has starred in Hallmark's "A Kismet Christmas" and "Christmas in Notting Hill," agrees the pay isn't too shabby for 15 days of work: "If you're getting a chunk of change and you're going to have fun, maybe travel somewhere too, that's not a bad deal."

Christmas movie sets are a 'well-oiled machine,' and the mood is usually light

Working in a Christmas wonderland can also do wonders for your mental health. Chad Michael Murray, who most recently starred in Netflix's stripper-hunk Christmas movie "The Merry Gentlemen," told BI that he likes working on holiday movies because there's less risk of encountering heavy subject matter that will bleed over into his personal life.

He recalled his experience shooting the 2016 Western "Outlaws and Angels," after which Murray said it took him a month to emotionally release himself from the character. He doesn't want to go through that again anytime soon.

"At this point in my life where I am, I got three young kids, this is what speaks to me. I love going home and being able to bring light to the situation," Murray said.

Podcaster Danny Pellegrino, who wrote and starred in his first Hallmark movie, 2024's "Deck the Walls," said his experience on set was surprisingly pleasant.

"You hear stories about being on movie sets, and so I was looking around thinking, 'Who's going to be dramatic? Where's the trouble going to be?' But everything was so smooth," Pellegrino said. "Everything is just a well-oiled machine."

Christmas movies have a cheesy reputation, but it probably won't damage yours

Though starring in a Christmas movie will never have the gravitas of a Scorsese movie, it's no longer taboo to say you enjoy holiday movies or want to be in one. Even Anne Hathaway is "desperate" to make a great Christmas movie, calling it her "weird bucket list thing" — and she already crossed "get an Oscar" off that same list.

Goldhar credits major streamers like Netflix entering the game with improving the genre's esteem. "That ups the game a little bit for people, and they see it differently," she said.

Of course, there's still a risk of typecasting where "somebody may seem more of a Hallmark type and so they don't get cast in mainstream television," Goldhar said. But that's less of an issue for already established actors with an extensive body of work — former teen heartthrobs like Murray, or "Beverly Hills 90210" star Jason Priestley, for example.

Ramos, who's best known for starring as Haddie Braverman on the 2010s NBC drama "Parenthood," admitted that when she was first approached for a Hallmark movie, she was hesitant.

"My first instinct was snobby, and I was like, no, I'm not going to do this. This is embarrassing. These aren't real movies, they're TV movies," Ramos said. She stressed over whether creators she wanted to work with would turn their noses up upon hearing she'd been in a Hallmark movie.

"Then I kind of realized, I don't know what good me trying to impress ['The White Lotus' creator] Mike White or whatever quote-unquote legitimate directors is doing for me," she said. "They kind of still weren't hiring me."

In fact, the opposite happened. Christopher Storer, the creator of FX's hit series "The Bear," was one of the people encouraging Ramos to do the Hallmark movie when she put it to a poll vote on her Instagram.

"He was like, 'I really want to learn how to make these,' and was basically like, 'Go for it,'" Ramos recalled.

Then he hired her for a recurring role on "The Bear."