‘Hot Frosty’ author Russell Hainline on his Netflix Christmas movie

Over the past few years, Netflix has tapped into the Hallmark Channel’s holiday season choke hold.

Author Russell Hainline is no stranger to Christmas movies, having written several titles for Hallmark, including Santa’s Summit and In cheerful measure. This week he debuted his first Netflix feature, the delightfully named, Hot Frosty.

The movie stars Hallmark cast member Lacey Chabert as Kathy, a widow and beloved local who wraps a magical scarf around a sculpted snowman with an eight-pack who becomes a real — and very naked — man named Jack. Hijinks ensue with the naïve and preternaturally good-natured Jack (Dustin Milligan), who is ogled by the local women and helps plan the high school’s winter party, all while being pursued by the police for the first display of public indecency. The film has received an overwhelmingly positive critical response and is currently on Netflix’s no. 1 most-streamed movie in the US

Prior to the release of Hot Frosty, The Hollywood Reporter talked to Hainline about coming along Hot Frostythe joke that didn’t make the final cut and kept cynicism out of the holiday: “Irony is a safety net. These movies should exist without that safety net.”

How did the idea come about? Hot Frosty come to?

Sometimes, as a writer, you like to come up with pitches that make your friends laugh, that make you laugh, that you never think will actually come to fruition. One that always got a laugh was: What if Frosty the Snowman came to life and instead of a snowman he was a super hot guy? Everyone I told would almost always reply: Yes, it should be a movie. So I thought about pitching it, but I was afraid that if I pitched it, during the whole process it would be watered down to something a little more milquetoast. I wanted it to be fun, so that my snowman would not immediately become just a fantasy man, but have the naivety and innocence of someone who was born yesterday. I wanted it to be a little sexier, just a pinch more. He comes into the world naked, like the old guy. So I wrote a spec (script). I totally assumed that I was just doing it for myself, doing something that you know I love and that no one would really want to do. I wrote it during the pandemic when my anxiety was very high and writing something like this gave me some joy. And here we are years later. yes, and of course here we are years later.

Did you pitch the script around town?

I was chosen by (production company) Muse, who really picked up on it and really loved it as it was. I know some people who read it saw the title and immediately said, “Not interested.”

And those people were wrong.

To me, that’s insane, right? The title is part of what makes it fun, and luckily we had a lawyer at Netflix who really loved the script and took the case himself. At a time when places are a little more risk-averse to see the title Hot Frosty on the front end might have been a hindrance at times, but thankfully not for certain people that we worked with at Netflix.

Were you nervous that the title would change during the production process?

I was nervous every day. I think having the talent to love the title helped a lot. I can’t believe I’m talking about the title Hot Frosty in the year 2024.

The title and premise are already so funny, but was there any gag that didn’t make it into the movie that was hard to watch go?

It’s crazy, but there was a joke about the movie The two popes. When Craig (Robinson) and Joe (Truglio) have all the pictures on the board – the classic selection of suspects – he had a picture of Anthony Hopkins up there from The silence of the lambs. And Joe Truglio would say, “Oh, he was so good at The two popes. Did you see that? He was one of the two popes!” And Craig said: “Of course he was one of the two popes! You don’t make a movie about two popes and cast Anthony Hopkins and not have him as one of the two popes!” I hoped so because this is a Netflix movie and The two popes was on Netflix, we could get this Two popes Turns out rights get complicated and these things are above my grade.

The movie has fun, but your main character, Cathy, is a widow dealing with the grief of losing her husband. While Jack constantly faces his own mortality and the impermanence of life because, well, he’s a snowman. These are very intense themes.

I think it’s easy to imagine a one-note joke version of the film that doesn’t approach the premise with sincerity or make the audience care. I also think it’s easy to imagine the novel version not having as much fun with the inherent comedy of the premise. I’m a big believer in sincerity in movies in general. I think there is a sincerity to the tone of Christmas movies that are often accused of being cheesy – and sometimes an audience can probably be right to judge it that way – but I find myself increasingly disinterested in movies constantly winking at the camera, or characters constantly making ironic, self-reflexive quips. These movies lean into sincerity in a way that people might again wave their hands and call corny, but irony is a safety net. These movies should exist without that safety net. They are unabashed what they are. This is why so many people tend to love them.

Hot Frosty is not your first holiday movie. You have written several for Hallmark. How did you get into making holiday films?

I grew up watching genre movies – aliens, monsters, disaster movies, creatures, anything I could watch on cable with my brother, basically. So when I moved to LA, that’s what I set out to do. You know, thrillers, sci-fi, horror, action. I wrote some specifications and took some meetings. I got a thriller made for Lifetime, but it didn’t really get the traction that I wanted. My anxiety grew throughout that presidency, and when the pandemic started, and frankly, I got tired of sitting around all day thinking of creative ways to kill people. I think a friend must have mentioned to me that they knew someone who makes these (holiday movies) and I thought, “Well, I’ll give it a go.” I knew nothing about Christmas movies. I knew nothing about this world and very early in 2020 I wrote a Christmas movie about a boy and a reindeer that was very inspired by my rescue Pitbull that I had. I had a lot of fun writing it and it felt really good to write – to have it be about good people doing their best and everything working out. I told a friend of mine from college, who is a great actress, (about the script) not realizing that she was friends with Jack Grossbart, who is a producer who has done a ton of Hallmark Christmas movies. She put me in touch with Jack, and Jack took me under his wing and helped me get my first movie made at Hallmark.

What have you learned while working in the space?

I admire the way they operate as a studio. At a time when there’s a lot of discourse out there about whether or not movie stars exist, Hallmark is creating its own in a very old fashioned way. A long time ago, you knew that when you saw a Warner Brothers movie, you were going to see Jimmy Cagney or Bette Davis or Lauren Bacall. Hallmark now has its own faces. They make a ton of movies, just like studios used to do back then, so tons of actors get their shots, and audiences build connections to these people and to these characters and to these worlds. At a time when it seems like movie studios are making fewer movies and much, much bigger budget movies, and star power feels like it’s less important than things like IP and CGI, here’s a studio that’s making a lot of movies every year. They are low budget and they are character driven. I feel there are lessons to be learned there.

A comparison that I like to make is Star Trek. I feel like most people may not know who the stars are or may not have heard of all these characters, but there are people who will line up for hours at conferences and pay good money to meet these people. There are people who run fan sites. There is a Hallmark Christmas cruise going on right now. It’s incredibly humbling. Just because it’s not something that everyone universally understands doesn’t mean there isn’t this intensely devoted pocket of fans to whom these movies mean the absolute world.

Hot Frosty currently streaming on Netflix.