The holiday season doesn’t end as soon as Santa Claus bids adieu, and yet compared to Christmas, there are essentially no New Year’s Eve movies. To be fair, this makes a certain amount of sense. Christmas has St.
Nick’s whole mythology, its religious origins, and a monopoly on wintertime merriment and good cheer. New Year’s Eve has a little Champagne, a dropping ball, and people counting down the literal seconds until the holiday has ended. There’s not as much lore to structure a New Year’s Eve movie around.
(Baby New Year, mercifully, hasn’t been mined to death as IP yet.) And besides, by the time the 31st arrives, people are holiday-seasoned out, and New Year’s feels more like a Christmas coda. This is a shame, because New Year’s Eve has so much thematic potential for moviemaking.
It’s about endings and beginnings. It’s about turning the page on the good and the bad — the melancholy exuberance of “Auld Lang Syne.” And, in most cases, it’s about a group celebration that’s simultaneously universal and deeply personal.
We’re all wishing for a happy New Year as we gather to watch the ball drop and ensure a January 1 hangover, but what that means to each of us is unique, and the best New Year’s movies approach this turning point in unique ways, too. Here are a dozen movies (plus one bonus New Year’s Day flick) that take full advantage of New Year’s Eve as a storytelling device. These are not Christmas movies where the epilogue extends anot.
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