Hallmark teams up with Super Bowl champs the Kansas City Chiefs for a football-inspired rom-com
Given where Hallmark is headquartered, it’s little surprise that if the Missouri-based greeting card and media company were to partner with an NFL team, it would be the Kansas City Chiefs.
A very evident result of that new deal between the brands is Holiday Touchdown: A Chiefs Love Story. Many of the Chiefs players and their head coach, Andy Reid, appear in the movie, featuring frequent Hallmark talent Hunter King as a member of a Chiefs-cheering family vying to win a “Fan of the Year” contest. Fellow Hallmark regular Tyler Hynes also stars as the team’s fan-engagement director, who surveys the finalists, and when he meets King’s character . . . well, take a guess what happens.
The Holiday Touchdown cast also includes Ed Begley, Jr., NBC weekday personality Jenna Bush Hager, Diedrich Bader, Megyn Price, Richard Riehle, dual Tony Award-winner Christine Ebersole and — as the manager of the central family’s restaurant — Donna Kelce, whose Chiefs tight-end son knows a bit about intermingling football and romance (though he’s not in the movie).
Holiday Touchdown writer Julie Sherman Wolfe admits that the widely observed and followed love story of Travis Kelce and music superstar Taylor Swift was “sort of a jumping-off point” for the script. “And then, the short that the Chiefs produced for the playoffs [a parody of Hallmark Channel movies] was kind of the next part. Honestly, I feel so strongly about the passion that fans have for the game of football, I think it transcends a particular team. If you didn’t know I was a [San Francisco] 49ers fan, you would think that I was a Chiefs fan.”
Newly engaged actress King notes that “we’ll take all the Swifties we can get” when it comes to viewership of the film. “I don’t know who wouldn’t want to watch this movie. It’s based and centred around love and passion and football and Christmas and family, and those are all things that I love and that are so important in my life. And I feel that for a lot of Swifties, that’s kind of her brand as well, so I feel like they would totally dig this movie.”
Hynes deems the new pairing of Hallmark and the Chiefs to be logical, given their respective fanbases. “There’s a sort of tight-knit, passionate fandom around both, and you can really feel it in both of those locations in Kansas City,” he explains.
While Hynes admits that he’s “not a huge sports guy,” he nevertheless “found myself very, very enthralled in the whole journey of the Super Bowl . . . And I think anybody who is a fan of romance or fans of sports or anything in the vicinity of that will resonate with this story because it’s centred around something that’s universal, which is family, love and a passion for a team or a sport.”
For film and TV veteran Begley, the experience of filming in Kansas City brought about a very different vibe than he’s encountered in Hollywood. “Definitely a different feel,” he says. “The salt of the earth people you encounter on the crew and spectators and people working in the background just break your heart, they’re so lovely.”
According to Samantha DiPippo, senior vice president of development at Crown Media Family Networks (Hallmark Channel’s parent company), the film’s feel-good energy hasn’t just been on the screen. “I feel like we’ve all put our heart and souls into this project,” she says of what’s been a labour of love for everyone involved.”
Holiday Touchdown: A Chiefs Love Story airs Saturday, November 30, on W Network