‘Hot Frosty’ is the Christmas miracle that keeps on giving

Where were you when you first heard about “Hot Frosty,” the gloriously ridiculous Netflix Christmas movie in which a snowman with 8-pack abs and zero body fat comes to life, charms a small town, gets the girl — and sweeps our collective culture off its feet?

“How are you people posting about anything OTHER than Hot Frosty?” Damon Lindelof, the Emmy-winning creator of such doom-filled series as “Lost,” “The Leftovers” and “Watchmen,” wrote on Bluesky, after the made-for-streaming movie debuted at No. 1 on Netflix and with a 100 percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes. (It’s a more reasonable 79 percent now that people have seen it.)

“A sincerely stupid idea executed sincerely,” crowed the Guardian’s Adrian Horton.

“A himbo story that’s good for you,” wrote Mashable’s Kristy Puchko.

“Incredibly horny,” praised the Wrap’s William Bibbiani in a delightful review that marvels at how truly awful the movie might be if it wasn’t “winking and whimsical” and entirely self-aware.

Since its pre-Thanksgiving debut, it’s been referenced by Paul Mescal on Saturday Night Live (as Bono talking about “a devastating documentary” he’s just watched about climate change — our hunky snowman’s Achilles’ heel is that he’s in constant danger of melting), and in a spoof ad for Ryan Reynolds’s Aviation gin in which a woman comes upon a ripped snow dude who looks like the “Deadpool” star and, instead of placing a magical red scarf around his neck, as happens in the movie, runs off with the bottle of gin he’s holding, ripping off his hand as he screams in agony (in his head because he’s still a snowman).

In these extremely divisive times, “Hot Frosty” seems to have captured a collective need for silliness and escapism that’s played out in countless celebrity look-alike contests and rampant Gen X/Xennial nostalgia that’s cropped up with a renaissance of early-aughts crushes like Adam Brody and Joshua Jackson; the incredibly fun reunion of Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie staging an opera for the 20th anniversary of “The Simple Life”; and Lindsay Lohan turning her life around, looking great and getting a well-deserved comeback in - what else? - Christmas movies.

“I think it’s striking a chord because it’s fun - it’s a joke that everyone is in on, so there’s no cruelty in embracing the fact that it’s corny,” says Lindelof, who describes himself as a huge fan of Christmas movies.

He continues: “What I love about ‘Hot Frosty’ is what I love about the genre in general — there’s magic and everything turns out okay. The stuff I make is dark as hell, but I’d go nuts if I didn’t offset it with a steady diet of delicious fluff.”

Like “Wet Hot American Summer” and “Hot Tub Time Machine” before it (why do all the funniest movie titles have “hot” in them?), just the name is an invitation to the dumb and delightful. Either you’re immediately onboard or you’re not.

In case you’re not convinced to watch it by the title alone, there is a plot. Sort of. Lacey Chabert — who’s been in 41 (!) Hallmark Christmas movies since she tried to make “fetch” happen as Gretchen Wieners in “Mean Girls” — plays a lonely young widow in a small town called Hope Springs (no, really) who (of course) runs the local diner. A kindly neighbor gives her a scarf that Chabert’s Kathy places on an entry to the town’s snowman-sculpting contest that looks like Michelangelo’s David and who soon comes to life as a Jack, an oft-shirtless Dustin Milligan — a.k.a. adorably innocent veterinarian Ted Mullens from “Schitt’s Creek” — who brings a similar golden retriever energy to the role of this nontoxic, ice-made dreamboat, albeit with long hair and a controversially sinewy build.

Within days, this handsome stranger with a penchant for baking, house repair and making friends with kids, has charmed the entire town, while also being on the lam from the town’s overzealous sheriff (the wonderful Craig Robinson playing the role like he’s in “Heat,” with Joe Lo Truglio from “Brooklyn Nine-Nine” as his deputy) for the great crime of stealing clothes. But will he thaw Kathy’s heart before he melts?

You should also probably know that the physics of “Hot Frosty” aren’t exactly sound. The popular podcast “Who? Weekly,” actually devoted an entire episode to this topic, entitled “We’re Still Out Here Solving the Science of ‘Hot Frosty’” - puzzling out burning questions like how Jack is able to cook in an industrial kitchen, but goes into a melting health crisis if he sits too long in a diner booth?

Even Kathy is a skeptic. “You just buy that he’s a snowman?” she asks town residents, one of whom nods and shrugs, “It’s Christmas!”

Mainly, the premise seems designed to ensure that Milligan spends a lot of the movie outside shirtless in the snow or frantically rubbing ice on his chest.

“Honestly, all we did was spray me with water when I was supposed to be hot - or douse me with water when I was getting really hot - which, considering we shot in mid-March in Canada, I 10 out of 10 do not recommend,” Milligan says in an email.

Dig a little and you’ll find people delighting in many other details, like how Jack’s long scarf is always comically covering his nether regions, or how the heat in Kathy’s house has been conveniently broken ever since her husband died, making it the perfect environment for a snowman-hunk.

Several weeks before it showed up on Netflix, writer Russell Hainline talked about the movie as his own version of a Christmas miracle. Back in 2021, he’d written a spec script “cuz I thought ‘what if Frosty the Snowman turned into a super hot dude?’ was funny,” he wrote on X. And now it’s a movie!

Originally from Jacksonville, Florida, Hainline spent ten years in L.A. working as a tutor and trying to write scripts for sci-fi movies and thrillers before he decided to try his hand at Christmas movies. “I was tired of finding creative ways to kill people on a daily basis and I thought, ‘Let me write something that feels good … this magical fantasy that doesn’t exist but I wish so badly would exist,’” he says over Zoom, looking like he’s teleported in from an ‘80s surfer movie.

This year, he’s had four Christmas movies come out, including one called “The Santa Class,” a Hallmark romance centered around two rivals at a school training mall Santas who must work together to save Christmas when the real Santa Claus shows up, having lost his memory.

While shopping the script for “Hot Frosty,” Hainline says, “We were told explicitly on more than one occasion that someone did not want to read it, straight up, because of the title.” But he was convinced the right people would eventually get it, and hoped it would land at Netflix, which has been working to dominate the Christmas space and has a penchant for wackier and more sexually suggestive fare than Hallmark and Lifetime.

To his delight, they were happy to keep the title.

“I still giggle when I say it!,” he notes. He says he tried to add some logic to the rules of when Jack melts and doesn’t, but ultimately, it’s better if “you can accept the magic of the world, like so many of the characters do, and just ride with it.”

There are also hidden depths. Slate’s Rebecca Onion posits that the movie is a hit because Jack, as newly “born,” hasn’t been socialized like a real man and can just be devoted to Kathy and her needs. Hainline wrote “Hot Frosty” during the pandemic and there is a theme of Kathy trying to put herself back in the world after something bad. Vulture’s Rachel Handler and others have also noticed that the movie seems to have a lot of commentary about police overreach. Hainline confirmed this theory on his Letterboxd and says, “It is meant to reflect things that were happening in the world and that were on my mind.”

Chabert was the first to sign on, giving the project legitimacy in the world of Christmas movies. (Her “Mean Girls” co-star and good friend Lohan also appears in a scene that features one of Lohan’s three - and counting - Netflix original movies, “Falling for Christmas” on TV. “That is so funny. That looks just like a girl I went to high school with,” Kathy says.)

Milligan got the part without an audition through director Jerry Ciccoritti, who’d worked on “Schitt’s Creek.” The actor says it reminded him of movies like “Splash,” “Elf,” “13 Going on 30,” “Encino Man” and “Big” - “all the ‘born yesterday/wish fulfillment’ type stories.”

Milligan says he went into the movie knowing that the “objectification of Jack’s body” was going to be the cornerstone of the comedy, so he just had to lean into that, while also remembering to be loose and filled with wonder like Jack is, because he’s just discovered the world. The scene where Lauren Holly plays a lusty neighbor who runs into a snowbank while ogling Jack is a shout-out to Brad Pitt working shirtless on a roof in Quentin Tarantino’s “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood,” says Hainline. There are also references to “Encino Man,” “The Terminator” and “Pretty Woman.”

Robinson came on board because he thought the script was “silly and cute and warm,” he says by phone. Plus, he loved the idea of getting to work with Truglio and spend a few weeks in Brockville, Ontario, where the film shot this spring. During breaks, he’d drive to Ottawa and do stand-up sets.

When Jack, disoriented and naked but for his strategically placed scarf, falls through a plate glass window and steals a sleeveless denim jumpsuit with the name tag he’ll start referring to himself as, it’s the first crime Hope Spring has seen in years and Robinson’s sheriff makes it his mission to find the perpetrator.

“I like that my character was so hard-nosed about this little itty-bitty crime in this itty-bitty town,” says Robinson. “When [the shopkeepers, who want to drop the charges, are] like, ‘Hey, we haven’t had a murder here in 100 years,’ he’s like, ‘You’re welcome.’”

While he’s heard from plenty of haters, Hainline says the reaction to the movie has been overwhelmingly positive. “I think people really want Christmas movies in general, but especially in times of anxiety or fear or concern they can provide a bit of a warm blanket, they can provide a fantasy of a better world that they wish existed,” he says. “I don’t think it’s a coincidence that this winter people seem to be gravitating toward Christmas movies.”

As for other burning questions, like who sculpted Hot Frosty in the first place, Hainline is keeping those answers close to the chest.

“I want to be a little cagey and not reveal too much because some of them are things that I want to address in a sequel,” he says. “If Netflix wanted to do ‘Hotter Frosty,’ I’ve got my pitch ready. I’m ready to go.”