One of the greatest and most festive animated movies of all time creeps up on Simba and Macaulay Culkin on streaming

There’s an argument to be made that the best Christmas movies are those that aren’t considered as such by everybody. Whether it’s Die Hard, Christmas with the Kranks (that is a horror movie and only a horror movie), or Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (don’t ask), sometimes the most fun you can have with Christmas movies is making a case for their existence as Christmas movies.

But The Nightmare Before Christmas is in a class all its own, because everyone can agree that it’s a Christmas movie, but no one can agree on whether it’s more of a Halloween movie than a Christmas movie. There is, of course, only one correct answer, but we’re not here for answers; we’re here for gladiatorial takes on great movies that happen to be rising up the Disney Plus charts.

Per FlixPatrol, The Nightmare Before Christmas is currently shoring up the Disney Plus film rankings in the United States in 10th place, staring straight at the behinds of the original Lion King and its ostensibly live-action 2019 remake (seventh and eighth place, respectively). All the while, Macaulay Culkin’s double-pronged claim to fame — Home Alone and Home Alone 2: Lost in New York — dominates the charts in first and third place.

The Nightmare Before Christmas stars Chris Sarandon and Danny Elfman as Jack Skellington (respectively providing his speaking voice and singing voice), the skeletal king of the delightfully spooky Halloween Town who gets the impulsive urge to hijack Christmas from Santa Claus and be the new King of Christmas Town. Of course, the overtly cheery and wholesome Christmas doesn’t gel particularly well with Jack’s macabre persuasion, and disaster follows soon after.

Perhaps the biggest reason that The Nightmare Before Christmas — and the debate surrounding it — has persisted as long as it has is because it’s one of the most intelligently-written animated films ever made. Its timeless stop-motion aesthetic (one that’s evocative of both the Christmas television specials of yore and the uncanny vibes that populate Halloween) calls attention to the collision of these two holidays just on its own, but the film’s proceedings carry a dual thematic and cultural weight whose profundity is world-class.

Indeed, Jack’s journey from Santa Claus wannabe to hopeless Yuletide imitator to the most staunch ally that Christmas could ever hope to have, is absolutely littered with plot beats that honor the similarities and differences between the historical, spiritual cores of both Halloween and Christmas. It all culminates in these two ways of being uniting on the grounds of love and cooperation; a union that, realistically, would welcome everyone’s opinion on where The Nightmare Before Christmas falls on the Halloween-to-Christmas scale.

And that emotional pulse continues to reverberate over 30 years later. Back in 2023, The Nightmare Before Christmas was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry, and that same November (i.e. the month smack-dab in the middle between Halloween and Christmas), Tim Burton himself said he would not have a hand in any other films set in Nightmare‘s world. Indeed, why throw another dart when you’ve already hit the bullseye to end all bullseyes?