Why the PenaVegas’ Upcoming Movie Isn’t the Typical Christmas Flick

Published: December 6, 2024

Why the PenaVegas’ Upcoming Movie Isn’t the Typical Christmas Flick

By Movieguide® Contributor

Carlos and Alexa PenaVega explained how they poured their heart and soul into their upcoming movie so it would be wildly entertaining rather than following the predictable tropes of a normal Christmas movie.

“We’ve done a lot of movies in this, you know, genre. You know, we’ve done a lot of Hallmark movies, a few Great American Family, Pure Flix, you know, we love family-friendly content. [But], there’s a lot of family-friendly content that I watch that I’m just like, ‘I wish we could give it some oomph.’ Like, how do we elevate this?” Carlos told Movieguide®. “So we set out with a bunch of goals for this movie, and I believe we accomplished every single one.”

The movie is GET HIM BACK FOR CHRISTMAS, which follows “Bella, a successful singer who returns home after a breakup with her singing partner, and in the meantime, asks Jack to help her write a song to win her ex back.”

“I sent it to my brother last week who does not watch any of these type of movies, and I said, ‘Listen, I need you just to watch this. I need your honest opinion because you’re not the demo[graphic] but I want to know what you feel,’” Carlos continued. “And his response was, ‘I am shocked at how good this was and how much I liked it.’ And I was like, ‘Let’s go. We won. We did it.’ That’s a true family movie right there when the family can sit down and watch it and enjoy it, and it’s not, you know, the dad or the uncle being like, ‘This is the only one [I’ll watch].’”

“We [wanted to] make a movie that makes people sit there, and they’re just like, ‘I want to know what’s next. Oh, a commercial? Let me grab some snacks, let me come back.’ Like, that’s what we wanted. And I really think we did that. Like, we get a lot done in 87 minutes,” he added.

Part of the reason the movie is so entertaining is because of all the organizations that got involved during the filming. The Salvation Army and The Dallas Cowboy Cheerleaders both feature in the movie and help the story come to life.

“[The movie] has evolved like crazy. So almost a year ago, actually November 12th of last year, we were in Maui right after the fires with the Salvation Army Fire Relief just trying to help out. And we were sitting outside of a Walmart ringing the bell trying to get people to donate,” Carlos recalled. “And I said, ‘Babe, what if it was like a love movie where, you know, a guy meets a girl at a kettle.’ And the Salvation Army was like, ‘Oh my gosh, you could make a movie with us, that’d be great.’”

“Two weeks before we were filming, we get a phone call from Great American Family and they’re like, ‘Hey, listen, can this movie take place in Dallas…? We just got the AT&T Stadium for your shoot…and we would like you to use the cheerleaders,’” Carlos continued.

“We were like, ‘Wait, what?’ So we kind of like scrambled to call our writer saying, ‘Can you rewrite now? We’re gonna shoot in Tennessee, but it takes place in Dallas and then we’re going to shoot one day in Dallas at the stadium.’ And he was like, ‘I don’t know how to make sense of this…[but] sure enough they came up with something that was even better than what we had originally,” Alexa added.

GET HIM BACK FOR CHRISTMAS will premiere on Great American Family on Dec. 14.

“It has been our dream to make movies like this together. This was the first movie that our production company was given the opportunity to produce and we couldn’t be more proud of how it turned out,” the couple posted on Instagram.