By almost any measure, The Santa Clause 3: The Escape Clause should be a forgotten movie.
It opened in November 2006 to brutal reviews. It made far less money than either of the films before it. It picked up 5 Golden Raspberry Award nominations, including one for Worst Prequel or Sequel. And it arrived at a moment when the franchise felt like it had already said everything it had to say.
And yet, almost 20 years later, The Santa Clause 3 keeps getting a second look. It streams every holiday season on Disney+. The franchise came roaring back with a TV series. And more and more viewers seem willing to admit that the third movie is a lot more fun than its reputation suggests.
The reason is not complicated. It is wearing a velvet suit and has frost on his eyebrows. It is Martin Short as Jack Frost.
How The Santa Clause 3 became a punchline
To understand the reappraisal, you have to understand how far the movie fell.
The first Santa Clause, released in 1994, was a massive hit, earning about $145 million domestically, according to Box Office Mojo. The Santa Clause 2 held steady in 2002 with about $139 million. Then The Santa Clause 3 opened on November 3, 2006, and landed in second place behind Borat, according to The Numbers. It finished with about $84.5 million domestically, a drop of roughly 40% from the second film.
The reviews were worse. The movie sits at just 17% on Rotten Tomatoes, and Metacritic rates it 32 out of 100. The New York Times‘ Manohla Dargis didn’t mince words, calling it “a seriously unworthy film.”
The Razzies piled on. Beyond the nomination for Worst Prequel or Sequel, the movie earned nods for Worst Actor for Tim Allen, Worst Screen Couple for Allen and Short together, Worst Excuse for Family Entertainment, and Worst Supporting Actor for Martin Short.
That last one is the punchline that has aged the worst.
Even the critics who panned it made an exception
Here is the most telling detail about The Santa Clause 3. Look at Rotten Tomatoes’ official Critics Consensus, the one-sentence summary of what reviewers thought. It is harsh about the movie. It calls the series tired and complains about bland gags and dumb slapstick. But it opens by making an exception. Playing Jack Frost as what it calls a cross between Liza Minnelli and Liberace, Martin Short, it says, is “a welcome presence.”
Think about that. The reviews were so bad that the Razzies nominated Short as one of the worst supporting performances of the year. And yet the consensus of the critics who trashed the film singled him out as the one bright spot.
Audiences seemed to agree. Moviegoers surveyed by CinemaScore gave the film a B+ on opening weekend, a respectable grade that suggests families who actually bought tickets had a much better time than the critics did. Its Rotten Tomatoes audience score is still low, but at 39%, it is more than double the critics’ score.
What Martin Short actually does with Jack Frost
So what makes Short’s Jack Frost work?
Start with the premise. Frost is a member of the Council of Legendary Figures, the North Pole’s version of a union board, alongside Mother Nature, Father Time, the Easter Bunny, and others. He is jealous that every other legend gets a holiday and he gets nothing. So he sets out to steal Christmas for himself, tricking Scott Calvin into invoking a loophole called the Escape Clause, which lets Santa undo the day he took the job.
That is a solid villain motive, but plenty of movies have solid villain motives and still fall flat. What Short brings is pure, unfiltered comic energy. His Jack Frost is vain, needy, theatrical, and wildly pleased with himself. He is a petty showbiz type trapped in the body of a winter spirit, a guy who desperately wants his own branded holiday and a little respect.
The look helped, too. According to the film’s production history, costume designer Ingrid Ferrin gave Frost a sleek velvet, zoot-suit style look after director Michael Lembeck felt an earlier design was not threatening enough. The result looks less like a fairy tale villain and more like a lounge singer who wandered into the North Pole and decided to stay.
Short and Tim Allen also had history. They had already worked together on Jungle 2 Jungle in 1997, and their comfort with each other shows. Allen plays it relatively straight, the exasperated dad in a red suit, which gives Short room to go as big as he wants. And he goes very big.
The It’s a Wonderful Life twist that gives Frost a real stage
The other thing that helps is that The Santa Clause 3 gives its villain a world to play in.
Once Scott triggers the Escape Clause, he gets sent back to 1994, the night he first became Santa, and Frost grabs the Santa coat before Scott can, taking the job for himself. Scott wakes up in an alternate present where he never became Santa. He is a workaholic corporate executive. He never married his wife, Carol. His ex-wife Laura and her husband Neil have split up. And the North Pole has been turned into a tacky theme park, with Christmas rebranded as “Frostmas,” Jack Frost in charge, and the elves miserable.
It is basically It’s a Wonderful Life with a candy cane coating, a “what if I had never done this” story where the hero has to see how much worse the world is without him. But it also gives Short a big, gaudy kingdom to rule over. Frostmas is Jack Frost’s dream come true, and Short plays it like a man who has finally gotten his name in lights.
Why the second look is happening now
So why is The Santa Clause 3 getting more love today than it did in 2006? A few things have changed.
First, it is easy to find. The whole trilogy lives on Disney+, which means families stumble onto it every December without having to go looking for it.
Second, the franchise came back. Disney+ launched The Santa Clauses in 2022, with Tim Allen returning as Scott Calvin. A new generation of viewers who discovered the series on streaming had a reason to go back and watch all three movies, including the one critics told them to skip.
Third, and maybe most important, Martin Short is having one of the great late-career runs in Hollywood. Since Only Murders in the Building premiered on Hulu in 2021, Short has racked up Emmy nominations and won over a whole new audience that knows him as the flamboyant, endlessly quotable Oliver Putnam. People who love that character are rediscovering what Short could do a couple of decades earlier, and Jack Frost is basically Oliver Putnam with a frost-bitten makeover.
When Short was cast, he had been working more on television than in movies, and he reportedly landed a seven-figure deal to play the role, according to Rotten Tomatoes’ news coverage at the time. In 2006, Jack Frost looked like a paycheck gig in a tired sequel. Today, it looks like a preview of exactly the kind of big, delightful comic performance that made Short a phenomenon all over again.
A flawed movie with one perfect ingredient
None of this makes The Santa Clause 3 a secret masterpiece. The critics were not wrong about everything. The jokes can be thin, the family subplot with Carol’s parents drags, and the movie never quite recaptures the clever, grounded charm of the 1994 original.
But a holiday movie does not need to be perfect to earn a spot in the rotation. Sometimes it just needs one thing that makes you happy to see it again. For The Santa Clause 3, that thing is a jealous, preening, zoot-suited winter spirit who just wanted a holiday of his own.
The Razzies thought Martin Short was one of the worst things in movies that year. Almost 20 years later, he is the reason people keep coming back.
