Christmas Movie Champ a "Nightmare"

It's amazing how often what I do outside of work gives me ideas for stuff to write about here (now, whether they're interesting to anyone else is subject to debate :) Last Saturday a  couple of buddies and I had what we called Christmas Movie Mania - we rented a couple of Christmas movies, watched one in the afternoon, went to the San Jose Sharks game that evening, and then came back and watched the other. What was interesting was deciding which movies to get - there were only 4 of us, but everyone had their own preferences of which ones were the best. With enough Christmas movies to fill up a chunk of your Tivo being shown around the holidays, it got me curious what the eBay Community at large thought about which ones were best (for the record, we went the comedy route with National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation and Scrooged).

So I whipped up one of my patentedly simple tests. I used eBay Marketplace Research to see which popular Christmas-themed movies had sold the most in the DVDs & Movies category over the past month, ending yesterday. I'm using raw numbers which can be skewed by multiple releases, box sets, and sellers listing memorabilia incorrectly in that category, but I'm figuring it would generally balance out. After tallying the results, I was pretty surprised - actually, stunned would be more appropriate. I thought that A Christmas Story would end up on top, but it actually finished third with about 1500 sold, being narrowly edged out for second place by It's a Wonderful Life, which sold about 20 more copies. The winner? In an absolute runaway with over 2300 sold, it was Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas that came out on top. I've heard it was a good movie (I haven't seen it yet), but it wasn't the picture I had in my head of what would be the bestselling Christmas movie.

Rounding out the field - The Polar Express showed well with about 1200 sales, and How The Grinch  Stole Christmas (another I thought was a contender because I included both the animated and Jim Carrey versions together, even though they're very different) wasn't far behind with about 1180. National Lampoon's sold about 975, Will Ferrell's Elf moved about 800, and the old classics of Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer and Frosty the Snowman both were in the 700-740 range. Bringing up the rear of my list was Miracle on 34th Street (about 625), A Charlie Brown Christmas (430), and Scrooged (280). Obviously a good choice by us to pick the movie which finished last in my poll.

Are there any classics I missed? If so, let me know on our Chatter Blog discussion board!