Production notes

Prior to Vince Vaughn and Reese Witherspoon's casting, it was announced that Spyglass Entertainment had set Adam Shankman to direct for Columbia Pictures. Howard Gould was brought in to provide rewrites. Seth Gordon was brought in as director at the insistence of Vaughn, who had seen Gordon's documentary The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters, a film, Gordon points out, which, like Four Christmases, has a "traditional three-act structure". The film began production in December 2007, during the 2007–2008 Writers Guild of America strike, which meant that no changes could be made to the script. During production, New Line Cinema became a "unit of Warner Bros.", which put the film's completion at risk.

On Rotten Tomatoes, Four Christmases has an approval rating of 25% based on 145 reviews and an average rating of 4.3/10. The website's critical consensus reads, "Despite a strong cast, this sour holiday comedy suffers from a hackneyed script." At Metacritic, which assigns a normalized rating to reviews, the film has a score of 41 out of 100, based on 27 critics, indicating "mixed or average" reviews. Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "B" on an A+ to F scale. The Hollywood Reporter called the film "one of the most joyless Christmas movies ever" with "an unearned feel-good ending [that] adds insult to injury"; it criticized the film's script for "situat[ing] Hollywood clichés about Southern rednecks incongruously within the tony Bay Area". Variety magazine called it an "oddly misanthropic, occasionally amusing but thoroughly cheerless holiday attraction that is in no way a family film". The Associated Press said the film "began with some promise" then segued into "noisy joylessness [that] sets the tone for the whole movie"; the review noted that "Vaughn makes the movie tolerable here and there, but this kind of slapsticky physical comedy doesn't suit Witherspoon at all." Frank Lovece of Film Journal International found "no core to their characters. They just embody whatever plot machination the movie needs at any given moment", and that, "Every predictable Christmas-comedy trope gets dragged out like the string of electric lights that is pulled from the wall to whipsaw through the living room". Roger Ebert gave the film two stars out of four, and wrote his review in the style of a pitch session between a filmmaker and his boss, whereby he derided the film's alleged lack of humour or narrative sense.

On its opening day, a Wednesday, it ranked second at the box office with $6.1 million, behind the previous week's new release blockbuster Twilight. It then went on to take the top spot each successive day from Thursday to Sunday, earning $46.1 million and ranking #1 over the entire extended Thanksgiving holiday weekend. In its second weekend, Four Christmases held on to the #1 spot, taking in another $18.1 million. The film grossed $120.1 million in the U.S. and $43.6 million in foreign countries, for a worldwide gross of $163.7 million.