This is an I-Heart podcast.

And we continue with our American stories, and we're bringing Christmas stories around the Christmas season, because that's what we do.

We all have our favorite movies to cuddle up with at Christmas time, from It's a Wonderful

Life to Miracle on 34th Street. But for many people, die hard is one such film that makes

the festive playlist. But is it actually a Christmas movie? Here to settle this question once and for all

is Stephen follows. Stephen is an established data researcher in the film industry and wrote the

widely circulated answer to this hotly debated question on his website, stephenfollows.com.

Here's Stephen with the story of how he came up with a definitive answer.

Hi, my name is Stephen Follows, and I am a film data analyst. Every week I do a new bit of research

into the film industry, and sometimes it's sort of very crunchy, and other times it's kind of

lighter and fun, and we times it's kind of lighter and fun and you know we've

tested different types of popcorn in different theatre chains and discovered who's got the same

supplier and you know all sorts of fun interesting strange things and so a few years ago I was

talking to some students and I was trying to get them to engage with the idea of what a movie is.

And in doing so, I stumbled upon an argument that I did not expect to be quite as visceral as it turned out to be.

I asked them whether they thought die hard was a Christmas movie or not.

That's it. That's the question. That was the simple question that I asked them. And I thought

it would be a quick entry point. And honestly, it took the entire day because there was about 30 students and they all

started throwing in questions and obviously it is a Christmas movie. Obviously it's not a

Christmas movie. And so I ended up splitting them into different groups. They did different bits of

research. And at the end of that day, we had a fairly satisfying answer. And so then I went home and that next week. I did some more

data research. I got a bit further into it. And I wrote it up as a blog article thinking, okay,

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