General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20265 min read

This Christmas

This Christmas is a 2007 American Christmas comedy-drama written and directed by Preston A. Whitmore II, about the Whitfield family's first holiday reunion in four years at the Los Angeles home of matriarch Ma'Dere Whitfield (Loretta Devine). Produced by Whitmore II and Will Packer for Rainforest Productions and distributed by Screen Gems (Sony Pictures Entertainment), it opened in wide release on November 21, 2007 and grossed about $49.1 million in the United States on a $13 million budget.¹^•²

Key fact	Detail
Director / writer	Preston A. Whitmore II (also producer, with Will Packer); production company Rainforest Productions¹
Theatrical release	November 21, 2007 (wide), distributed by Screen Gems / Sony Pictures Entertainment; PG-13 for comic sexual content and some violence¹^•²
Running time	117–118 minutes (listed as 1h 57m and as 118 minutes)¹^•³
Box office	$49,121,934 domestic, $17,958,183 opening weekend in 1,858 theaters; $13,000,000 production budget²
Ensemble cast	Loretta Devine, Delroy Lindo, Idris Elba, Chris Brown, Regina King, Columbus Short, Sharon Leal, Lauren London, Keith D. Robinson, Mekhi Phifer, Laz Alonso⁴
Title origin	Named after the 1970 Donny Hathaway song "This Christmas"⁵
Critical scores	Rotten Tomatoes 56% Tomatometer (81 reviews, average 6.00/10), 81% Popcornmeter; Metacritic Metascore 63¹^•⁶
Home media	DVD released November 11, 2008 by Sony Pictures Home Entertainment; estimated DVD sales of $23,163,742²

Spoilers

Plot and characters

Ma'Dere Whitfield, known to everyone as Shirley Ann Whitfield, runs a dry cleaning business in Los Angeles and shares her home with Joe Black, a church deacon played by Delroy Lindo. Her six children come home for their first Christmas together in four years, and each arrives carrying a secret.⁷^•¹

The film's conflicts, as outlined in the synopsis and reviews, include:

Quentin (Idris Elba), a jazz musician who has been away four years, arrives with gambling debts and henchmen on his tail, and treats Joe coldly while hoping his father will return.⁷^•⁸
Claude (Columbus Short), a marine, comes home having gone AWOL to make a surprise announcement about his marriage.⁷^•⁹
Lisa (Regina King), the eldest daughter, is stuck with a cheating husband, Malcolm (Laz Alonso), who urges her to persuade her siblings to sell the family business, setting her against Kelli (Sharon Leal).⁷^•⁸
Michael, called "Baby" (Chris Brown), the teenage youngest sibling, secretly plans to become a singer; Ma'Dere, soured on music by her ex-husband, wants him to do something more respectable.¹^•⁸

Reviewers noted that Ma'Dere herself carries two secrets: she has divorced her husband and is living with her boyfriend Joseph, and nearly everyone knows her secrets while nobody knows most of the others'. Roger Ebert, the Chicago Sun-Times critic (Pulitzer Prize for criticism, 1975), described the result as "a very busy holiday comedy" with a screwball-comedy structure and a heart.³

Production

Screen Gems approached Whitmore about making a family reunion picture, but he was hesitant after the criticism his basketball film Crossover (2006) received; executive producer and Screen Gems president Clint Culpepper assembled the components around him. Whitmore credited executive producer Clint Culpepper with surrounding him with enough of the right components that the film's quality was hard to miss.⁵

The title was fixed from the start. "The title of the film had to be named 'This Christmas' because of the Donny Hathaway song by the same title," Whitmore explained; when the Hathaway song played on the radio in Detroit, where Whitmore grew up, it represented the beginning of the Christmas season. He called the film a tribute to his Detroit childhood, drawing on family experiences and characters.⁵

Reception and box office

Commercially, the film earned back nearly four times its budget. It opened on November 21, 2007, the day before Thanksgiving, with $17,958,183 over the weekend, 36.6 percent of its total domestic gross of $49,121,934; the worldwide total was about $49.7 million, of which 98.8 percent was domestic. The film ran an average of 5.6 weeks per theater, with a maximum of 1,921 theaters.²^•¹⁰ Estimated DVD sales added $23,163,742 after the November 11, 2008 home-video release.²

Critics were split along a consistent line. The Rotten Tomatoes critics consensus reads: "This Christmas features strong performances and a sharp portrayal of family dynamics, but relies too heavily on holiday movie clichés."¹ At Metacritic the film scored 63, with 17 positive, 7 mixed, and 0 negative reviews.⁶ Roger Ebert scored it 75, praising how Whitmore "manages to direct traffic" among overlapping crises and singling out the music, including Chris Brown, then 18, singing a traditional song "in a classic and beautiful style."³^•⁶ The Los Angeles Times review called the cast "so good, you just glide right over the contrivances of the plot," though it noted the film lingers too long in a church sequence.⁸ Time Out's review described the plot as ticking off personal crises "in strict adherence to soap opera predictability" while calling the actors terrific, including "a star-making turn from Chris Brown."⁹

Audience response has been markedly warmer than the critics' score: the Popcornmeter stood at 81 percent from more than 50,000 user ratings, versus the 56 percent Tomatometer.¹ The film has become a recurring holiday watch for many viewers, and it is often grouped with later Black family holiday ensemble films such as Nothing Like the Holidays and Almost Christmas.¹⁰^•¹

Place in the genre

The Charlotte Observer's review argued the film differs from the usual holiday fare in one obvious way, that most of the cast are African Americans, and more importantly in its willingness to leave some problems unsolved and some unhappy people unchanged.⁶ Ebert made a related point: it is a movie about African Americans, but not "an African-American movie" in the segregating sense, rather an American family comedy whose family happens to surface all its problems within about 48 hours.³ Critics repeatedly noted the soundtrack of seasonal soul and funk classics as a major asset.⁹

The film ends with the cast taking turns on an improvised dance floor in Ma'Dere's living room, a fixed shot the Los Angeles Times review read as a curtain call for the actors.⁸

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Comedy and romantic films (individual works) › Comedies of 2007 to 2008 › Released in 2007

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 21, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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