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!)
