Jack Black’s New Comedy Movie Returns Him To An Unexpected Genre 18 Years After His $206M Kate Winslet Rom-Com

The newest Jack Black movie sees the actor returning to an unexpected genre after nearly two full decades. Black, who had his breakout role in the 2000 John Cusack movie High Fidelity, is best known as an actor in a wide variety of comedy movies including Shallow Hal, School of Rock, Tropic Thunder, and Kung Fu Panda. While he has appeared in movies consistently throughout his career, he experienced a major resurgence when he starred in the two most recent Jumanji movies opposite Dwayne Johnson, Karen Gillan, and Kevin Hart.

In the past five years since his appearance in Jumanji: The Next Level, Black’s output has included a variety of well-known titles. This includes the animated feature The Super Mario Bros. Movie, which grossed over $1 billion, and the fourth Kung Fu Panda movie, which is the sixth highest-grossing movie of the year worldwide at the time of writing. His upcoming projects also include the video game adaptation A Minecraft Movie, which co-stars Jason Momoa, Emma Myers, Danielle Brooks, and Jennifer Coolidge.

Dear Santa Is Jack Black’s First Christmas Movie Since The Holiday

The Holiday Debuted In 2006

Jack Black’s latest cinematic outing is the Paramount+ Christmas comedy Dear Santa, in which he plays Satan, who attempts to corrupt a naive young man who accidentally misspelled the name on his letter to Santa. The movie, which was directed by Bobby Farrelly from a screenplay co-written by Ricky Blitt and Peter Farrelly, marks the first time that he has starred in a Christmas movie since 2006’s The Holiday. That movie, which was written and directed by Nancy Meyers, followed an English woman (Kate Winslet) and an American (Cameron Diaz) swapping houses and finding love over Christmas.

Although The Holiday had mixed reviews from critics, earning a 51% Rotten Tomatoes score, viewers responded to it much better than critics, as evidenced by the 80% audience score on the same platform. However, neither this response nor the fact that it earned $205.8 million, becoming the twelfth highest-grossing movie directed by a woman of the decade, seems to have been enough for Black to return to the Christmas comedy genre immediately. Until 2024, it remained the only Christmas movie in his filmography.

Dear Santa Gives Jack Black A Very Different Type Of Christmas Movie From The Holiday

It Has The Complete Opposite Tone

While both of Jack Black’s Christmas movies are comedies, they could hardly be more different. While The Holiday is a classic romantic comedy set during the holiday season, Dear Santa is more interested in subverting the wholesome trappings of Christmas. While it is still a family movie, depicting Satan more as a puckish prankster spirit rather than a purely evil entity, it features irreverent teenage-oriented humor in addition to the fantastical elements that separate it from the 2006 movie, which is much more realistic.