OK. Let’s say you’re the sort of person who sees ropey romantic comedies with Vince Vaughn. Which of these do you go to?

These are, of course, the same film. But oddly, the one which has been stripped of all things Yuletide is the one being released in Australia and New Zealand. Here’s the trailer — watch as the voiceover guy completely fails to actually mention the name of the movie. I’m not saying either of them look good, per say, but one of them at least manages to get across some kind of concept to the audience. I don’t recall what the tagline for the Down Under version is, but it didn’t do much to dispel the obvious and erroneous conclusion that our two vertically different actors would be travelling to four different relaxing destinations and getting away from it all, rather than having four awful family experiences in one day.

At least, Four Christmases sounds shorter.

I’m not the first person to notice this, by the way. Clearly sensible people everywhere are bemused. Unlike Mr Dunks, I’ve never read a letter to the editor whinging about overly Christmasey overtones — rather, I only ever seem to read the ones which whinge about said hypothetical whingers. But either way, I find it hard to imagine anyone taking issue with a film for involving Christmas as a tangential and not particularly Christian plot point.

And if these people do exist, is the plan to hoodwink them into seeing such a film? There must be more of them than I can possibly imagine to make the effort of rebranding the film worthwhile.

I don’t get it. What upsets me more, though, is the realisation that at some point in my life, “Four Christmases” turned from sounding awesome to sounding terrifying, and I didn’t even notice.

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This entry was posted by the illustrious Tom Charman on Monday, December 1st, 2008. It concerns such pressing issues as film. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.