Upcoming holiday film Happiest Season, directed by Clea DuVall and starring Kristen Stewart, will go straight to streaming. The film follows Abby and Harper (Stewart and Mackenzie Davis), a young lesbian couple traveling to rural Pennsylvania for the holidays to visit Harper's family. While they're on their way, Harper breaks the news to her girlfriend that she has yet to share the news of their relationship or even come out as gay to some of her more conservative family members. The supporting cast consists of Victor Garber, Mary Steenburgen, Allison Brie, Aubrey Plaza, Dan Levy, and more.
With the holiday season being near synonymous with an overabundance of cookie-cutter heterosexual rom-coms, Happiest Season is a more than welcomed new take on the genre. Despite romantic comedies in general having the status as a staple in film, proper LGTBQ+ representation in movies of all genres is still seriously lacking. More and more films have come out within the past few year centering around gay love, but Happiest Season is the first of it's kind in depicting a WLW relationship as the main plot in a classic Christmas rom-com.
According to EW, Sony announced Happiest Season will now stream on Hulu on November 25. That is the day the film was originally scheduled to open in theaters. The studio is hopeful the film will be able to play in theaters overseas, assuming they stay open.
Happiest Season likely would have struggled at the box office if it only came out in theaters, so its move to streaming makes sense. Some theaters are closing again as new coronavirus cases continue to rise, and movies that did play on the big screen earlier this year (namely, New Mutants and Tenet) underwhelmed commercially, particularly in the U.S. With traditional theatrical releases unfeasible, studios are adjusting their release slates. It's become common for smaller, non-franchise titles to move to streaming, and the hope is Happiest Season will be able to find an audience on that platform. Hulu's had success with this type of story before (see: Love, Victor), so hopefully this will be a good home for Happiest Season.
When news first broke that Happiest Season was in the making, fans of the people behind it and members of the LGBTQ+ community were beyond excited for the film to come out. The depiction of a queer couple in a more normalized and domestic setting is beyond important when it comes to representation, allowing younger gay people to have a fun and full of love film showing a regular, everyday gay relationship as the main story. Opposed to the quirky side character, butt of the joke, limited screen-time story still tragically seen today, Happiest Season may just be the breakout film to change it all.
Happiest Season is set to be available for streaming November 25th on Hulu.
Source: EW