Filming Christmas in July? How Hollywood strikes hit holiday movie-making here

Due to the Hollywood union strikes, the amount of holiday films produced in Canada for networks like Hallmark may be greatly reduced.

It’s a classic holiday film tale: small towns, snowflakes and star-crossed lovers.

But this year’s queue of beloved holiday movies may be considerably smaller due to the worldwide shut-down of productions caused by current Hollywood writers’ and actors’ strikes.

Glitch SPFX is an Ottawa-based special effects company responsible for simulating most of the artificial snow in holiday films produced in the province in the last five years — the majority of those films for American studios and networks.

Now, Glitch SPFX founder Ben Belanger said the company is completely out of work.

“It went from us working on literally three films at the same time in June … and then it was the writers’ strike that seemed like it was going to be nice and short.”

“But now with the actors’ strike jumping on top of that, it makes things a little more uncertain,” Belanger told Global News in an interview, referring to the Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA) and Writers Guild of America (WGA) strikes.

Glitch has been in business for 10 years, but Belanger said the last five have been especially lucrative due to deals with American networks such as the Hallmark Channel, known for pumping out some of the most talked about holiday films each year.

Many of those films have been produced in Canada, with small-town locations in Ontario and British Columbia as well as the nation’s capital Ottawa flourishing with business the past few years.