12 New Year’s Eve Movies to Ring In 2021
New Year's Eve is a holiday filled with excitement, anticipation, optimism and the potential for new adventures - all characteristics that would seemingly make it the perfect vehicle for movie storylines. However, like so many annual resolutions which go unfulfilled, New Year’s Eve films fall woefully short.
Unlike Christmas or Halloween, two holidays that inspire new movies on a yearly basis, New Year’s Eve is rarely the centerpiece of a popular motion picture.
Sure, there was the 2011 flick New Year’s Eve, a romantic comedy that tried to copy Love Actually’s formula for success by utilizing multiple parallel storylines leading to a climactic ball drop in New York's Times Square. Although it featured a star-studded ensemble cast - including Robert De Niro, Ashton Kutcher, Lea Michele, Halle Berry, Sarah Jessica Parker, Josh Duhamel, Seth Meyers, Jessica Biel, Jon Bon Jovi, Michelle Pfeiffer, Zac Efron and Sofia Vergara - New Year’s Eve was only a mild success.
Critics picked the film apart, and it netted five Razzie Award nominations, including Worst Picture of the Year. Still, it was a box-office success and marked one of the only instances where New Year’s Eve was given front-and-center attention.
In most other cinematic instances, the holiday is used as the background framework for pivotal moments - like the first kiss of a budding romance, an "aha" moment of enlightenment or the perfect distraction for a heist. Read on to see our collection of New Year’s Eve movies - some expected, some surprising - in the below gallery.