Hallmark For All Seasons

Because I am a nerd, and love creating Excel spreadsheets with all kinds of color formatting and formulas, I have created one with a goal of ranking all of the Hallmark movies I watch in 2019.  I had such a good time watching all the Hallmark Christmas movies, and began following a lot of Hallmarkies on Twitter, and as the year came to a close a lot of them created Top 10 lists.  When I created my own list, it was really hard to pick the various rankings because I was ranking them after I watched all of them, and some (to be honest) ran together into one giant she’s-moving-out-of-the-big-city-and-meets-the-small-town-guy-who-helps-her-realize-her-dreams kind of movie.  As such, other than my Top 10, which is legit my Top 10, I may not have accurately ranked the rest of the movies.

Will I be able to watch all of the 2019 Hallmark movies?  I highly doubt it – that’s a LOT of movies (especially since I have both Hallmark channels and, tbh, I’m not big into mysteries in general).  But I’ll watch as many as I can and rank them accordingly.

My categories, similar to how I ranked the Christmas movies:

1. Plot – is the plot something I’d be interested in watching? (1-100 pts) (Weight: 4)
2. Actors – do I like the actors who made the movie? (1-100 pts) (Weight: 3)
3. Chemistry – do those actors have any chemistry at all? (1-100 pts) (Weight: 2)
4. Feelgoods – does this movie make me smile and feel happy when it’s over? (1-200 pts) (Weight: 5)
5. Tropes – does it have enough of the Hallmark tropes I have come to know and love? (1-250 pts) (Weight: 3)
6. Did I hear that right? – things that don’t make sense (plotholes) – I don’t mind them, but… (1-100 pts) (Weight: 1)
7. Re-watchability – is it a Christmas movie I’d watch again and again from year to year? (1-150 pts) (Weight: 2)

As you can see, to make sure that I don’t end up with 20 movies that all get the same score, I created a variety of points scales as well as weighting each category.  Total points a movie can earn is 1000.  The weighted max points total is 152.5.  My hope is that by the end of 2019 I’ll have a good idea of exactly which movies worked for me, and which ones didn’t.

There have only been two new movies to air thus far as part of Hallmark’s Winterfest 2019.  I won’t do full on reviews here of the first two, but will at least begin the general ranking.  Now that the spreadsheet has been created, I hope to do mini-reviews of each movie, going over each category listed above, and update the 2019 rankings as I go.

1. One Winter Proposal (air date: January 12) – 635 points – final weighted score: 100.8 points (66.1%)
2. The Winter Castle (air date: January 5) – 605 points – final weighted score: 92.4 points (60.6%)

With percentages in the 60s to start, I shouldn’t have to worry about the movies all bunching together since I’m sure there will be some standout movies coming up throughout the year.  If I find that a lot of movies DO begin bunching together, I’ll adjust my scores and weights accordingly.  But I don’t think it’ll be an issue in the long run.

This weekend “A Winter Princess” airs on January 18, and “Winter Love Story” on January 19 (both on Hallmark Channel).  On Hallmark Movies & Mysteries on January 20 we have “Ruby Herring Mysteries: Silent Witness” which I’m only going to watch because I like Taylor Cole.

Do you have any Hallmark movies that are you looking forward to in 2019?  I know I’m looking forward to “Mystery 101” with Kris Polaha and Jill Wagner on HMM in a couple weeks, and even the Crossword Mysteries movie in March that stars Lacey Chabert and Brennan Elliott.  Funny that I’m not a big mystery fan and yet two things I’m looking forward to are mysteries.

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