Hallmark’s Chiefs-Inspired Movie Comes Home for the Holidays: “Once This Airs In Kansas City, It’s Going to Be Like the Moon Landing”

As her son plays football on the field below, some fans angle their faces toward Donna Kelce, who sits high above in a box on loan to Hallmark. She brings both a serene smile and armed security to the packed suite where she’s come to chat about Holiday Touchdown: A Chiefs Love Story, which the network propelled into production after tight-end Travis Kelce and global superstar Taylor Swift began their real-life love story.

The matriarch now known as “Mama Kelce” entered Arrowhead Stadium for a post-Thanksgiving game between the Kansas City Chiefs and Las Vegas Raiders to a flurry of flash bulbs. Still, she doesn’t think locals are just as eager for a glimpse of her as they are to see Taylor and Travis. “They just know who I am,” Kelce tells Vanity Fair with that same insistent grin. “They expect me to be here because I’m Travis’s mom. Many of these people have had seats in the stadium for generations. Football’s family in Kansas City.”

It sounds like a line straight out of Holiday Touchdown, an advantageous marriage of two storied Kansas City brands. The Chiefs are back-to-back Super Bowl Champions who have lost only one game since last Christmas; Hallmark’s greeting card business has been headquartered in Kansas City since its founding in 1910. And yet, somehow, a Hallmark holiday film had never been filmed in the area.

It took a fake trailer for a made-up movie called Falling for Football to ignite that spark of brand synergy. As Hallmark exec Samantha DiPippo tells VF, both brands officially came to an epiphany around the time the Chiefs won their latest Super Bowl: “This past NFL season was basically like a Hallmark movie.”

Before long, Julie Sherman Wolfe—writer of more than 20 Hallmark films over nearly a decade—was summoned. “It was only a week after the Super Bowl that they asked me to write this movie. The ironic twist of this whole thing is that I’m actually a very diehard 49ers fan,” says Wolfe. “I was definitely still licking my wounds, but I’m a professional.” Delving into enemy territory proved less painful than Wolfe imagined. “I have to admit, I don’t hate the team,” she says sheepishly. “I just want to beat them in the Super Bowl—that’s all.”

Even though Kelce and Swift’s relationship helped catalyze the film, it’s less obviously ripped from the headlines than Lifetime’s recent, far more blatantly Tayvis-inspired movie Christmas in the Spotlight. “I think they’ll stand the test of time,” Wolfe says of Swift and Kelce’s courtship, “but you don’t want the success of your movie to be based on somebody else’s relationship.” Instead, the film pays homage “to the romance that they brought to the Chiefs and NFL” via Derrick (Tyler Hynes, a Hallmark vet who also appeared in Falling for Football), head of fan engagement for the Kansas City football team, and Hunter King’s Alana, a local die-hard fan. They fall for each other as he judges whether her family is fit to win the Chiefs Fan of the Year award. (A real thing, promises this Kansas City native!)

The couple meets-cute at the barbecue restaurant Norma and Nic’s (not a real thing!), managed by a woman named Donna…who also happens to be played by Donna Kelce. (She has a similar role in Hallmark’s 2024 Philadelphia-centered holiday film, Christmas on Call.) Mama Kelce wears a No. 87 Chiefs jersey in honor of her son, but confirms to VF that she is not playing herself in the film, inviting an all-important question: Does Travis Kelce exist in this Hallmark-Chiefs multiverse? “I guess he exists in the universe,” says the film’s screenwriter. “There are cameos from current players,” including Mecole Hardman and Trey Smith, as well as head coach Andy Reid. “But Travis’s name is not specifically mentioned in this movie.”

Travis Kelce and his brother Jason publicly acknowledged Holiday Touchdown during a recent episode of their New Heights podcast. Meanwhile, Lara Krug, the Chiefs’ first-ever chief marketing officer, previously told VF that the team is eager to maintain Swift’s privacy during the roll-out. “We consider her a part of Chiefs Kingdom,” Krug said. “We respect her as a fan; we respect them as a couple in their personal lives.”

And even Donna Kelce is being demure about her own performance. “I don’t even know if I want to watch myself, because you are always your own worst critic,” she says. Yet she is unwavering in her love for KC. “I know this city so well over the past 11 years, and I was just so excited to bring a light onto Kansas City. This is a wonderful town. They treat me and my family with so much love, and my son and I give it right back.”

Two weeks and approximately 1200 miles away from Kansas City, the cast of Holiday Touchdown gathers at Rolf’s, a German restaurant near New York City’s Gramercy Park that’s famous for its year-round holiday decorations. Minutes after he enters the establishment, a couple at a nearby table recognizes Tyler Hynes—who’s starred in nearly 20 Hallmark movies since 2018—and asks to buy him a drink. “This is the tastiest thing I’ve ever had in my life,” Hynes says after sipping his beverage and before making a shocking confession for someone synonymous with Christmas: “I’ve never had egg nog.”

Our server says we’ve snagged a table during the restaurant’s mid-November sweet spot. Arrive one week earlier, and it might be empty. Come one week later, and it’s a tinsel-strewn zoo. Timing was similarly key for Holiday Touchdown, which wasn’t announced until a week before filming began. Cast members signed NDAs before joining the project, and the film’s leading couple didn’t meet until the table read. “Nothing will bond you like a Southwest flight,” King says of the cast’s first foray into typical Midwest air travel, “watching Tyler try to figure out what it meant to line up and go to your seat.”

Since then, Hynes has become a dedicated Chiefs fan. He’s even gone back to binge-watch past seasons, referring to individual games as “episodes” and playoffs or Super Bowls as a “season finale.” While other football franchises can feel “a little more clinical and polished,” says the actor, Chiefs players are “working class, all heart—and they keep winning on these bizarre turns of events. If I would have opened up the hood on this team and it was different, I would probably just go back to my life. But before bed for the last two or three months, it’s Chiefs every night before I pass out.”

Once Kansas City caught wind of the movie, its citizens showed up in droves to tailgate outside scenes filmed in Independence, Missouri. On Mondays, local crew members quizzed the cast on which barbeque joints they had frequented over the weekend. (Ed Begley Jr., a vegan, praises the barbequed tofu at Jack Stack BBQ.) When it came time to film scenes at the Chiefs’ Arrowhead Stadium during three of the hottest days in July, thousands of extras braved the scalding heat in sweaters and scarves. DiPippo says production chugged more than 1,200 bottles of water in a single day. “We were on stroke watch,” says Megyn Price, who plays Alana’s mother, Leah. But there was nary a complaint from the crowd, adds Hynes: “It was fascinating to see how willing and patient everybody was in such crazy circumstances.”

Much of the movie hinges on a family’s lucky hat, which they believe must be worn on Christmas Day for the Chiefs to make it to the Super Bowl. The script called for a Chiefs baseball cap until Chris Stathos, head of partnerships at Hallmark Brand Experiences, remembered his grandfather wearing a Chiefs beanie to shovel snow during the holiday season. “When he passed away, my dad got that hat, and one day I know it’ll be mine,” he texted DiPippo. “Everybody put a little bit of themselves into the movie in some way,” she says.

Diedrich Bader, who plays Alana’s father in the film, returned to the area for the first time since doing press for 1993’s The Beverly Hillbillies. “Kansas City people are really into Kansas City,” he tells me, a fact with which I’m all too familiar. (Have I mentioned that I grew up there, too?) “There’s a lot of city pride. It’s the only location I’ve ever been to where 100% of the people guessed why I was there.” The film, he predicts, is going to be major: “I think once this airs in Kansas City, it’s going to be like the moon landing.”

There is indeed plenty of fervor, if not full-on hysteria, when Holiday Touchdown launches on a chilly Saturday night in Kansas City. A crowd of fans flock to watch the film’s premiere red carpet at the very same downtown Sheraton hotel that hosted my senior high school prom.

“Are you in the movie?” an employee asks upon my arrival—a testament to just how many locals populate the film, including city mayor Quinton Lucas; a pet named Catrick Mahomes, who went viral for his wigged resemblance to Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes; and—as I’ll later discover—my fourth grade teacher. At the premiere, Hallmark hunks like Jonathan Bennett and Wes Brown mingled with Kansas City-based Bachelor Nation stars Tanner and Jade Roper Tolbert, as well as both Chiefs and Hallmark alumni.

Reactions to the film’s concept range from apathetic—“You’ve seen one, you’ve seen ‘em all,” one of the event’s bartenders shrugs when asked if he’d ever seen a Hallmark movie—to ecstatic. “My friends say I’m a walking Hallmark card,” says one retired employee of the company, who’s wearing a gold evening gown and red jacket with a bedazzled football on it for the occasion.

Later at the premiere, a woman named Chris, who spent her career working for Kansas City’s baseball and football teams, brags about the grandson who shares her name. Like many in the city, he has worked for both the Chiefs and Hallmark, helping to secure his “YaYa” a spot as an extra on one of those scorching days in Arrowhead. Soon, said grandson approaches our table, a worn red beanie in hand. It doesn’t take long to realize that this is the hat, the slightly frayed, fuzzied-in-a-good-way keepsake that looms large in Holiday Touchdown.

The hat reminds me of what inspired screenwriter Julie Sherman Wolfe to write the heirloom into the movie: a satin 49ers jacket passed down from her late father, which she bequeathed to her 15-year-old son. “Connor was convinced that he had to be wearing it in a particular way for the 49ers to win,” she says. “The poor kid still blames himself for losing the Super Bowl because the top button wasn’t buttoned.”

After cheering on two sons in the NFL, Mama Kelce isn’t superstitious. But the people in her viewing box for Friday’s game—Taylor Swift and her father Scott among them—are prone to some game day pressure. “My friends in the suite said, ‘If they start winning, then don’t come back,’” she tells Vanity Fair from Hallmark’s spot in the stadium. “So I have to stay here.”

As if scripted by Hallmark—and, some would grumble, NFL refs—the Chiefs won in dramatic fashion during the final seconds of their game against the Raiders. But a true storybook ending wouldn’t be complete without a little snow. The next morning, hours before Holiday Touchdown’s premiere, Kansas City got its first frost of the season. Call it coincidence if you must—but those under the Hallmark and Chiefs’ hometown spell would prefer to keep drinking the cocoa.