For decades, A Charlie Brown Christmas has been a holiday tradition for millions of families. The TV movie made its debut almost exactly sixty years ago on December 9, 1965, on CBS, and has since been in more or less constant holiday rotation on broadcast TV and home video. But since Apple became involved in the Peanuts franchise back in 2018, things have become more complicated.
In 2020, Apple acquired the exclusive rights to a number of the most popular Peanuts TV specials, meaning that It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown, A Charlie Brown Christmas, and others would no longer be broadcast regularly for free to the public. For the first few years, Apple allowed PBS to air A Charlie Brown Christmas once per year, but now they have changed their policy, and instead allow non-subscribers to watch the movie for free once a year (this year, that’s on December 13 and 14).
Exclusive streaming deals aren’t uncommon, even when it comes to movies and shows that everybody loves. In fact, series like The Office and Seinfeld have been leveraged to help sell new streaming platforms. What’s less common, though, is what Reddit just figured out: you also can’t buy or rent A Charlie Brown Christmas digitally.
That’s decidedly more rare, and while it is not immediately clear what happened, the most likely scenario is that Apple’s exclusivity extends to rentals and purchases.
It also isn’t just A Charlie Brown Christmas; a number of Peanuts specials, including It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown, A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving, and I Want a Dog for Christmas, Charlie Brown, are currently marked unavailable on digital rental/retail platforms like Fandango at Home and Prime Video. It appears as though you also cannot buy or rent the movie on Apple TV, although members can stream it for free, and the platform offers a 2-week free trial to new users as of this writing.
Nevertheless, putting a holiday classic completely behind a walled garden is likely to upset some fans. The top comment on that Reddit thread is “physical media forever,” and other popular opinions can be fairly evenly divided between “just buy a DVD player” and “pirate the movie.”
Earlier Blu-ray copies of A Charlie Brown Christmas came packaged with a free digital copy, and those who already own the movie on digital platforms will be able to watch their own copy while they are logged in. It’s just new customers who will be turned away.
Additionally, Warner Bros. participates in the Movies Anywhere partnership, so if you own a copy on Prime, Fandango, iTunes, or another participating vendor, you should be able to merge your libraries and watch A Charlie Brown Christmas on any other participating platform. While I redeemed my digital copy on Vudu (now Fandango at Home) back in the day, I can watch or download the movie on Movies Anywhere, iTunes, and Prime Video right now.
Current Blu-ray copies available on digital retailers like Barnes & Noble and Amazon don’t advertise a digital copy included. Since Warner Bros.’ digital copies have expiration dates, if you find an older copy of A Charlie Brown Christmas that still advertises a free digital copy, it may not properly redeem. A complaint to your digital retailer might or might not work, but you’ll certainly have to have a receipt for the Blu-ray purchase to even get that far.
The good news is that, while Apple’s current deal gives them exclusive rights to the Peanuts specials through 2030, it’s unlikely A Charlie Brown Christmas will become as rare and expensive as notable Blu-rays like 28 Days Later and Dogma have in the past.
In those cases, the Blu-ray print runs were relatively small, and those $100 price tags were essentially supply and demand at work once the movies became unavailable. The same thing recently happened with cult hit The VelociPastor, before it came back into print (although that one is also sold out at the moment).
A Charlie Brown Christmas is a different animal entirely. Copies of the movie on VHS, DVD, and Blu-ray have been plentiful as long as those formats have existed. It’s also an evergreen hit for Warner Bros., constantly selling during the holiday season and presumably in print more or less perpetually. Even if they stopped making new copies today, there are millions in the world. It’s basically as “rare” as a trade paperback copy of Watchmen or The Dark Knight Returns. So, as long as you have a physical media player, you can be basically guaranteed that you won’t have to pay more than retail price for a copy of A Charlie Brown Christmas anytime soon.
So, I guess, uhh…physical media forever! Is that the takeaway here? It feels like the takeaway. Apologies to u/thecurseofchris for stealing his bit.
