The Man With the Bag: A Veterans Day Thank-You to AmazonMGMStudios
We spent Veterans Day night in a dark theater in Los Angeles, watching Arnold Schwarzenegger put on a red suit.
AmazonMGMStudios threw a special Veterans Day screening of The Man with the Bag, which lands on Prime Video December 2.
Veterans came with spouses, kids, and grandkids. Santa hats in the lobby. A photo booth with a line. One lady parked her walker at the end of the row and settled in. The place filled up, the lights went down, and for two hours nobody in there was thinking about anything except whether Santa was getting his bag back.
Shout out: AmazonMGMStudios. Thank you. We mean it!
Ten cities
LA wasn't the only stop. AmazonMGMStudios set up special veteran screenings in ten cities:
Atlanta · Boston · Chicago · Dallas · Los Angeles · Minneapolis · New York · Philadelphia · San Francisco · Seattle.
Nobody made them do this. Anybody who works around veterans organizations knows how rare that is. Most thank-yous show up in your inbox. This one came with a seat and a room full of people you'd want to sit next to.
The movie
The plot is beautifully predictable, in the best way. Somebody swipes Santa's magic bag of gifts, so Santa goes and recruits a thief off the Naughty List to help him steal it back. Arnold Schwarzenegger is Santa. Alan Ritchson, from Reacher, is Vance, the thief. Awkwafina is the elf who grabbed the bag in the first place. Adam Shankman directed it. It was terrific.
Arnold is having a ball, and you can tell. Thirty years after Jingle All the Way, he's back doing Christmas, except this time he's the guy in the suit. Same deadpan he's been running since the eighties, now aimed at reindeer and candy canes. Worth the Prime subscription on its own.
Ritchson is the right guy to stand next to him. Big, funnier than people give him credit for, and smart enough to get out of the way and let Arnold cook.
And Awkwafina. She plays naughty to perfection. She's the reason the whole thing moves.
It's PG. No cringing, no checking whether the grandkids are still in the room. Still funny for the adults, which is harder than it looks. Warm, goofy, a little bit of an action movie, and great comedy.
The Man with the Bag premieres worldwide on Prime Video on December 2, 2026.
Why it mattered
Standing in that lobby, we saw men and women who served in different decades, different branches, different wars, all standing in the same photo booth line making the same jokes. That doesn't happen on its own.
Somebody had to open the door. AmazonMGMStudios opened it. On behalf of the veteran community: thank you.
It's the same thing we're after, just a different lane. Rally4Vets raises money to get service dogs to veterans who need them. A dog takes up to two years and as much as $40,000 to train, and it costs the veteran nothing. Show up for the people who showed up.
The Rally4Vets verdict
Must see. Get it on the family list for December 2.
Kudos to Arnold and Alan Ritchson for a pairing that totally works. To Awkwafina, who we'd happily watch in a whole second movie as that elf. And to AmazonMGMStudios for helping veterans and families spend Veterans Day the right way.
Thanks for the seat. We'll be back on December 2 with the grandkids!
@AmazonMGMStudios @PrimeVideo @PrimeMovies @Schwarzenegger @alanrichson @awkwafina #themanwiththebag #rally4vets @J2Captures_Photograph
Also: Thanks to the Emerald and J2Captures teams for getting everyone registered and taking wonderful family photos. [J2Captures.com is veteran-owned, BTW]
