10 Classic Christmas Films That Actually Came Out In The Summer
3. Die Hard
Probably no other Christmas movie is as much subject to the "but is it a proper Christmas movie?" debate as Die Hard, even while simultaneously being namechecked by others as the greatest Christmas movie of them all.
It's not just that the skyscraper hostage scenario is a Christmas party on Christmas Eve itself that makes the film that coined the phrase "Now I have a machine gun, ho ho ho!" a suitably festive classic. It's also a story about bringing a family back together (and with a wife whose seasonal name, Holly, is as on the nose as any Hallmark Christmas heroine).
The doubters, though, are given some ammunition by the fact that Fox first released this "Christmas" movie in July 1988, a fault not remedied until the release of the Die Hard: Christmas Edition on home media in December 2018.
Its sequel Die Hard 2: Die Harder retained both the Christmas setting and summer release (coming out on Independence Day in 1990) before the festive elements were dropped for the later instalments (along, increasingly, with the quality of the movies).