Violent Night 2 trailer offers look at one of your early Christmas 2026 cinema options
Merry bloody Christmas
2022’s Violent Night was a fun diversion from cloying and sentimental Christmas movies, and director Tommy Wirkola is back with a second movie in the series, out this December.
Violent Night 2 will be in cinemas from 4th December, and a new trailer gives us an idea of what to expect. Avoid the video below if you want to enter the cinema spoiler-free.
Yep, David Harbour is back as a retribution-ready Santa Claus, but this time he starts the movie off all washed up after the events of the first film. He’s stripped of this powers, and has ended up on the naughty list he once tended to.
Caution: there are even more standard trailer story spoilers in this teaser:
While it might be tempting to see this storyline as a nod and wink to the hot cultural water Harbour found himself in after Lily Allen’s 2025 album West End Girl was effectively an expose of their relationship. But let’s not forget plans for Violent Night 2 were confirmed in 2023, and multiple drafts of the scripts had been written by mid-2024 — not to mention entering production by the end of that year.
“It’s time to save Christmas, and get off the naughty list,” says Harbour’s Santa in the teaser, while apparently attempting — and failing — not to dole out extreme violence to a bunch of baddies who have invaded a local mall.
This is not the first 2026 Christmas movie to star an actor more contentious than he once was too. Ebenezer stars Johnny Depp as Scrooge in an eyebrow-raising adaptation of A Christmas Carol that also features Ian McKellen, as Jacob Marley, and Rupert Grint as Bob Cratchit.
Traditional Christmas cheer is apparently not the order of the day this Christmas, although we expect to see some fluffier fare pop up in time.
The original Violent Night was a solid success, netting $76.6 million at the box office off a $20 million production budget.
You’ll also get to see David Harbour in Avengers: Doomsday, as Red Guardian, due in cinemas on 18th December, while he is also set to star alongside Stranger Things co-star Millie Bobby Brown in what Netflix calls an “upcoming spy drama series.”
