Good news for fans of eerie CGI renders of beloved celebrities with giant lifeless rubber fish eyes: AI image generators are now pretty freely available. On a more disappointing (but related!) note, there’s no The Polar Express prequel titled The Christmas Express.
Where to begin? In 2004, Robert Zemeckis released the first entry in what would lovingly be remembered as his “Pinned Down in the Uncanny Valley Trilogy.” Preceding 2007’s Beowulf and that Jim Carrey A Christmas Carol thing from 2009, The Polar Express took viewers on a journey of imagination and festive delight, rekindling the holiday spirit and, through its behind the scenes DVD extras, alerting a generation of children as to what Tom Hanks looked like in a unitard.
Since then, the computer animated feature has become a classic of the genre, both for its magical sense of wonder and its fever dream dance sequences. It brought in over $300 million at the box office with an additional $150 million or so from home video releases. If anything, it’s bananas to think that there hasn’t been a sequel yet.
Then, in 2023, hope: A poster featuring a suitably unearthly Tom Hanks, dressed as a full 20% of his characters from The Polar Express, hit the internet, purporting to advertise an imminent prequel story titled The Christmas Express. Exploring the train accident-related genesis of the beloved Woodford Newton’s career as the Spirit of Christmas, it seemed, if not good, entirely possible. “December 2023,” the poster promised, and nearly a quarter of a million users liked it.
The problem, aside from writing a children’s Christmas movie about a train accident (I’ve tried. The Star Wars Holiday Train Heist Catastrophe remains on “read.” Thanks for nothing, Kathleen Kennedy) is that The Christmas Express doesn’t exist. The poster was designed by showbusiness satire account YODA BBY ABY, a hit-and-miss page dedicated to fake press releases for movie sequels that will never come to pass. Generally, they’ll focus on Star Wars content, as suggested by their name, but they’ve been known to branch out. Some of their AI-assisted work, like the Christmas Express poster, is pretty easy to buy as real. Other times, it’s a first-draft photoshop of Tim Allen and Jamie Lee Curtis in Christmas with the Kranks 2.
Additionally, Max, the supposed distributor of the prequel film, has made zero effort to advertise the supposed all-CGI sequel to a beloved holiday classic. Tom Hanks hasn’t said anything about it, nor has Robert Zemickis. No further artwork or production footage has hit the internet. There’s just no The Christmas Express. If it helps, other YODA BBY ABY projects like David Harbour’s Grinch sequel and a Rowan Atkinson Mister Bean/Star Wars crossover are also unlikely to come to fruition.