​Spend Christmas With the Crawleys — Plus a Sneak Peek at the 2022 'Downton Abbey' Film

Celebrate Christmas with the Crawleys! PBS Masterpiece is broadcasting the 2019 movie on Christmas Day 2021, and again on Jan. 2 after the premiere of the new series, Around the World in 80 Days, starring David Tennant.​​

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Grownups love the Crawleys​​

Forget superheroes — the Crawleys are a bona fide franchise, and the $195 million hit film of their aristocratic exploits was driven by AARP’s grownup cohort. Most viewers at its premiere were over 55, and the median age for addicts of the original TV show was 60 to 63.

"With Downton Abbey, baby boomers flex their muscles at the multiplex,” says The Hollywood Reporter. "Bottom line: Make movies that have appeal to this audience and they will show up in droves,” Comscore box office analyst Paul Dergarabedian tells AARP. “Don't leave the influential, passionate, movie-loving folks over 50 out in the cold.”​​

Hugh Bonneville, 55, who plays Downton's Lord Grantham, tells AARP: “Cinema number crunchers are going to have to go to their calculators and say, ‘Hang on, maybe there is an audience that goes for films with gravitas or wisdom behind them.’”

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Hugh Bonneville (left) stars as Lord Grantham and Michelle Dockery as Lady Mary Talbot.

Ben Blackall/Focus Features

Downton Abbey stars share a sneak peak with AARP ​​

There’s more to get excited about in 2022. Downton Abbey: A New Era, which picks up the plot a year later in 1927, is scheduled to open in March and boasts most of the old cast, plus newcomers Dominic West, 52, as an aristocratic Downton guest and French star Nathalie Baye, 73, as a longtime crony of Violet Crawley (Maggie Smith, 87) — who this time around has scandalously acquired a villa in France from a mysterious man in her past. ​​