Summary

Netflix's new rom-com 'Falling Inn Love' appears to target Hallmark Channel's audience with a formulaic yet profitable approach to love stories.

Abstract

Netflix's 'Falling Inn Love' is a romantic comedy that closely follows the Hallmark Channel's successful formula of wholesome, predictable storytelling. The movie features a big city individual, played by Christina Milian, who wins an inn in a small New Zealand town and learns to appreciate the rural lifestyle while falling in love with a local handyman, portrayed by Adam Demos. The Hallmark Channel's audience, primarily older, female, and Christian, is known for its loyalty, and these viewers favor stories with traditional relationship dynamics, often lacking diversity in lead roles. Netflix's venture into this genre with 'Falling Inn Love' and its Christmas movie lineup indicates a strategic move to capture a share of this profitable market. The success of these movies could influence whether Netflix continues to produce similar content in the future.

Opinions

The Hallmark movie formula is described as highly formulaic and cheesy, with repetitive plots centered on big city individuals finding love in small towns.
Hallmark movies typically present antiquated ideas about relationships, gender, and race, with a history of predominantly casting white leads and relegating people of color to supporting roles.
Despite their outdated themes, Hallmark movies are lucrative, with significant advertising revenue, suggesting a robust business model.
Other networks, such as TV One and Lifetime, have recognized the profitability of the Hallmark formula and have developed their own holiday movies to emulate this success.
Netflix's 'Falling Inn Love' is seen as a direct attempt to attract Hallmark's dedicated audience by offering a similar wholesome, romance-centered narrative with no violence, cursing, or sex.
The movie's success could determine Netflix's future investment in similar non-holiday romance films aimed at capturing the demographic that appreciates clean, predictable love stories.
The film's quality is considered satisfactory for its genre, with enough humor and attractive leads to engage viewers, but whether it can draw viewers away from Hallmark remains uncertain.

Is Netflix Going After Hallmark Channel’s Audience With Their New Rom-Com ‘Falling Inn Love’?

Starring Christian Milian and Adam Demos the movie fits right in with Hallmark’s current lineup.

Official movie poster for Netflix’s Falling Inn Love

The Hallmark Movie.

These movies are about as formulaic and cheesy as any movie can be.

The story is almost always the same: big city guy or girl who may be disillusioned with work or life, goes back home/visits a small town and falls in love with the opposite sex small-town person and learns to appreciate small-town life, leaving their big city life behind.

These movies have very antiquated ideas about relationships, gender, and sex. The racial politics of these movies aren’t any better. Until very recently, only white people were allowed to be the leads, with characters of colors playing supporting roles.

If you haven’t encountered the Hallmark movie, then I’m going to go on a limb and say you don’t have an over 50’s, very Christian woman you’re close to in your life. They are demographic that makes up almost 27 percent of Hallmark Channel’s viewership, the highest of any group.

The other important aspect of these movies, however, is that they are incredibly profitable. From Business Insider:

All that viewership brings in ad dollars. S&P Global Market Intelligence’s Kagan research group projects that the Hallmark Channel brought in $370 million in advertising revenue for 2017. It expects that number to increase to more than $390 million this year.

While Hallmark is mostly known for its Christmas movies, they’ve successfully taken their Christmas formula and applied it to their other movies that air outside of the holiday season. It’s one big cash cow of family movie fare.

Other networks have tried to mimic their success. TV One, a network that caters to African-Americans, now has their own Christmas movie lineup. Lifetime has gotten into the Christmas movie frame as well ordering 28 new Christmas movies for 2019.

Netflix is the latest entrant in the Christmas movie wars having premiered several Hallmark-like movies in recent years.

2017’s A Christma’s Prince was the first shot across the bow and a big hit for the streaming network. 2018 saw a sequel to the A Christmas Prince and 24 other Christmas themed movies, some a complete ripoff of the Hallmark model.

While the Christmas wars are clearly on, Netflix also seems to be creating non-holiday movies in the Hallmark mold as well.

Their new offering, Falling Inn Love (2019), is such a Hallmark movie that I told my mother, an avid Hallmark movie watcher, that Netflix had made the perfect movie for her. It was Hallmark without being on Hallmark, right up her alley.

The movie stars Christina Milian as San Francisco native Gabriela, an out of work recently single woman who “wins” an Inn in small-town New Zealand.

Gabriella quickly learns that her big city self is out of place in small-town New Zealand. Her inn is hardly move-in ready, being more of a project that could be a profitable business once fixed up.

Hijinks ensue and Gabriela ends up working with Jake Taylor (Adam Demos) the hunky everyman who recently lost his high-school sweetheart and is handy with a hammer.

I don’t really need to tell you what happens next, because if you’ve seen one Hallmark movie you’ve seen them all. What’s more interesting is that this film is on Netflix at all.

It’s not quite like the network’s other romantic comedy offerings — Set it Up (2018) and Someone Great (2019) are a couple of examples — being much more wholesome and saccharine than those earlier entries.

With Falling Inn Love it seems like Netflix is making a play for those non-seasonal wholesome eyeballs. Movies that appeal to a demographic like my mother and godmother who want movies that have no violence, cursing or sex and showcase two conventionally attractive (heterosexual) people falling in love after having some minor obstacles to overcome.

It’s too early to tell whether these non-Christmas Hallmark-like offerings will become the norm. Netflix is clearly all-in on the wholesome Christmas movie front with A Christmas Prince: The Royal Baby (2019) and The Knight Before Christmas (2019) starring Vanessa Hudges from last year’s A Princess Switch (2018) lined up for this holiday season.

The success (or failure) of Falling Inn Love will ultimately determine if Netflix will continue with this type of romantic comedy and be able to compete with the Hallmark Channel for that older female audience.

The movie itself isn’t bad. It hits all the right beats. The comedy is just funny enough and the leads are easy on the eyes.

Will this be enough to pry away Hallmark’s loyal audience, or at least have them watch Netflix movies along with Hallmark’s offerings?

Who knows.

But it was a good first try and it will be interesting to see where they go from here.