The best Christmas movies on Amazon Prime Video right now

Scrooged is basically A Christmas Carol, but modernized and played more for laughs with Bill Murray in the leading role as Frank Cross, a Scrooge-like network executive at the IBC Television network. On Christmas Eve, Frank forces his employees to work on A Christmas Carol broadcast while giving them chintzy gifts for Christmas.

In other words, Frank is a perfect candidate for some Christmas Carol magic to find any humanity under his sleazy exterior. The Ghost of Christmas Past (David Johansen), the Ghost of Christmas Present (Carol Kane), and the Ghost of Christmas Future (Robert Hammond) are really going to have their hands full trying to convince Frank to change.

Unless your kids are old enough to see a candy cane turned into a lethal weapon without running away screaming in terror, then Violent Night may not be the perfect family Christmas film for you. Once you look past the over-the-top action and grisly deaths of the bad guys, you may see that this movie really does get what Christmas is supposed to be about. It’s also very easy to sympathize with David Harbour’s burnt-out Santa Claus.

Santa is ready to call it a day on Christmas for good when he finds himself trapped in a rich family’s home on Christmas Eve while a thief calling himself Scrooge (John Leguizamo) and his men threaten their lives. Because one of the family members, Trudy (Leah Brady), really believes in both Santa and Christmas, Santa embraces his inner John McClane in the best Die Hard-adjacent film we’ve seen in years.

Alicia Witt and Donald Faison star in this Lifetime Christmas movie about a cynical TV executive (Witt) who wakes up after a blow to the head to discover a completely different life. She’s settled in a seemingly perfect little town, married to her former sweetheart (Faison) with two children. But the little snow globe fantasy isn’t real, and the executive has to decide what’s really important to her between this fantasy and the real world.

Sometimes life comes at us with impossible choices, and Katherine (Hilarie Burton) has some to face in the romantic comedy Christmas on the Bayou. Katherine has worked hard to become a successful marketing executive, but she starts to think all of the time she spends at work is having a negative impact on her son Zack (Brody Rose). She decides that bringing Zack with her back to her hometown for the holidays would be a welcome change for them both. While she’s there, she runs into her old childhood love Caleb (Tyler Hilton), who does everything he can to convince her to leave the big city behind and come back home. Shot dead center by Cupid and seduced by a less hectic way of life, Katherine will need the guidance of her mother (Markie Post) and the wise Papa Noel (Ed Asner) to figure out what path to take.