Tim Allen’s Christmas Flop Tried to Advertise Itself as the New ‘Passion of the Christ’

Tim Allen is obviously very closely associated with Christmas movies, mostly because of the time he killed Santa Claus, stole all of his clothes and then assumed the immortal elf’s identity. But Allen has also made a few holiday flicks that have absolutely nothing with the convoluted mythology of the Santa Clause-verse. 

Most notably, there was 2004’s Christmas with the Kranks, which found Allen and co-star Jamie Lee Curtis playing a married couple who decide to skip their annual Christmas celebration and spend their money on a Caribbean cruise instead. As a result of this holiday transgression, they’re ostracized by their neighbors and punished by the universe.

Despite the fact that Christmas with the Kranks was a wacky Tim Allen comedy based on a book by John “I need something mindless to read on this plane” Grisham, and not a gore-soaked Biblical adaptation, the makers of Christmas with the Kranks decided to take their marketing cues from Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ. 

The Gibson movie opened in February of 2004, nine months before the release of Christmas with the Kranks. And that film’s success was clearly on the minds of the Kranks crew during filming. Curtis recalled in an interview that her first meeting with Tim Allen turned into a 20-minute conversation between him, director Joe Roth and screenwriter Chris Columbus, all about their “interpretations” of The Passion of the Christ. 

When Kranks was released later that year, it had a slight problem: the movie stank, and critics hated it. It currently has just 5 percent on Rotten Tomatoes. But The Passion of the Christ had already proven that good reviews weren’t necessary to make money at the box office. So, seemingly inspired by Gibson’s approach, the studio behind Christmas with the Kranks launched what The New York Times noted was a “print campaign built almost entirely on endorsements from religious broadcasters and family advocates.”

Outlets like The Austin Chronicle called the film “egregiously mediocre and flagrantly ill-conceived in every department,” but ads instead cited reviews from faith-based media organizations like The 700 Club which proclaimed, “Tim Allen has never been funnier! An instant family classic!”

While it was pretty clear to industry experts that Kranks was trying to follow Passion of the Christ’s lucrative formula (minus the flesh wounds and conspicuous anti-Semitism), one studio executive claimed that the Kranks pull quotes weren’t intended to send a religious message, stating that "the values of the movie are Christian values. About the brotherhood of Christians and Jews.” 

Of course, how did we not get that from the scene in which Allen Botoxes the hell out of his face?

Meanwhile, Allen promoted the film by speaking with the Christian Broadcasting Network, telling them that Christmas is “really about the birth of Jesus.  And on top of that, you had this other ancillary character about Santa Claus. Eventually, as you get older, you combine the two. I still think that is a dangerous situation." 

Which sure is a weird thing to hear from the same guy who made a movie in which Santa saves Christmas by brawling with a time-traveling Jack Frost.

Did the strategy work? Well, Christmas with the Kranks made over $90 million worldwide on a budget of $60 million. So it was a critical disaster, but a minor box-office success.

Presumably it would have done a lot better had they committed to the bit and crucified Allen’s character at the end.