Arnold Schwarzenegger is trading his usual action-hero wardrobe for a red Santa suit in the first trailer for The Man with the Bag, a holiday action-comedy coming to Prime Video on December 2, 2026.
The film marks Schwarzenegger’s return to Christmas movies 30 years after he raced around town searching for a Turbo Man action figure in Jingle All the Way.
The new trailer introduces Schwarzenegger as Santa Claus, whose magical bag has been stolen by a disgruntled elf played by Awkwafina. With Christmas in danger, Santa turns to Vance, a former thief played by Alan Ritchson, to help recover the bag. Vance has a history on the Naughty List, but apparently Santa is willing to overlook a few past misdeeds when the fate of Christmas is on the line.
Directed by Adam Shankman, The Man with the Bag follows Vance as he assembles a team of criminal misfits to pull off a holiday heist and get Santa’s stolen property back. Jane Krakowski, Ken Jeong and Liza Koshy also appear in the cast.
For Schwarzenegger, playing Santa is a new holiday milestone, but Christmas movies are already part of his filmography. His best-known seasonal outing remains Brian Levant’s Jingle All the Way, released in 1996. Schwarzenegger stars as Howard Langston, a workaholic father who promises his son Jamie the season’s hottest toy, Turbo Man. After leaving his shopping until Christmas Eve, Howard finds himself competing with other desperate parents, including a postal worker played by Sinbad, in an increasingly chaotic search for the hard-to-find action figure.
The movie was not universally embraced when it first arrived, but its reputation has changed over the years. Jingle All the Way has developed a lasting following among viewers who grew up with it, and Schwarzenegger has clearly enjoyed seeing the film become part of their holiday traditions. In a 2019 interview with GQ, he described it as the Christmas movie people still play every December, adding that it also performed well overseas.
Schwarzenegger has also explained why he wanted to make the film in the first place. After several action-heavy projects, he was interested in doing something completely different. In an interview excerpt featured in MEL Magazine’s oral history of Jingle All the Way, he said he wanted to move away from the biggest guns and action and take on something opposite. He called the Christmas comedy one of the great scripts offered to him and said he thought the world of it.
There is another Christmas movie in Schwarzenegger’s career that is considerably less familiar. In 1992, he directed Christmas in Connecticut, a television remake of the 1945 holiday comedy originally starring Barbara Stanwyck. This time, Dyan Cannon played Elizabeth Blane, a successful television cooking-show host who has convinced the public she is an accomplished home cook. The problem is that she cannot actually cook. When her manager arranges for her to prepare Christmas dinner for a forest ranger played by Kris Kristofferson during a live broadcast, Elizabeth has to keep her carefully constructed public image from falling apart.
Tony Curtis and Richard Roundtree also star in the film. Schwarzenegger did not take a leading acting role, although he made an uncredited appearance as an unnamed production assistant. The movie premiered on TNT in April 1992, an unusual release date for a Christmas story. It remains Schwarzenegger’s only feature film directing credit, making it a particularly unexpected entry in a career better known for The Terminator, Predator and Total Recall.
Now, more than three decades after that directing detour and exactly 30 years after Jingle All the Way, Schwarzenegger is stepping into the role of Santa himself. The trailer for The Man with the Bag gives him a stolen Christmas delivery problem, a former thief to recruit and an elf who clearly has her own reasons for causing trouble. Whether the new film earns a place alongside Howard Langston’s annual Turbo Man hunt remains to be seen, but Arnold is finally getting to play the person responsible for delivering the presents.
