Bad Santa is a 2003 American Christmas black comedy crime film directed by Terry Zwigoff, written by Glenn Ficarra and John Requa, and starring Billy Bob Thornton in the title role, with a supporting cast of Tony Cox, Lauren Graham, Brett Kelly, Lauren Tom, John Ritter, and Bernie Mac.

At the mall, Willie is visited by Thurman Merman, a friendly but exceedingly gullible, dimwitted young boy who believes he really is Santa and is constantly bullied by a teenage gang of skateboarders.

After having casual sex with Sue in his beaten-up Impala, Willie is harassed and attacked by a man he had encountered earlier at the bar, but Thurman intervenes.

Willie, about to commit suicide by inhaling vehicle exhaust fumes, gives Thurman a letter of confession for the police, including his misdeeds and the heist planned for Christmas Eve.

Marcus and Lois are in prison; Willie ends the letter by hoping that Roger will avoid them and telling Thurman that he should be out of the hospital soon and to be ready for his return.

In January 2002, Variety announced that Terry Zwigoff would be directing Bad Santa (his fourth picture and follow-up to Ghost World) under Dimension Films, with Glenn Ficarra and John Requa writing the screenplay and the Coen brothers serving as executive producers.

[4] The Coens had developed the concept for Bad Santa, before eventually hiring the writing team of Ficarra and Requa to bring the story to life.

[5] When the script's final draft was sent to Universal Pictures, the studio rejected it because "[I]t was the foulest, disgusting, misogynistic, anti-Christmas, anti-children thing we could imagine," all of which influenced Bob Weinstein of Miramax Films (Dimension's parent company) to give it the green-light.

[5] The Coens initially tailored roles for specific actors, such as James Gandolfini as Willie (since they had worked with him on The Man Who Wasn't There), Danny Woodburn as Marcus, and Angus T. Jones as Thurman.

[5] Bill Murray, Jack Nicholson, and Robert De Niro were also considered for the role of Willie, but it eventually went to Billy Bob Thornton.

[5] Upon learning of Cox's casting, the Coens told Weinstein that they "hate" him, and according to Zwigoff, Dimension was pining for "a more Disney-like generic cute kid" to play Thurman.

The site's critics consensus reads: "A gloriously rude and gleefully offensive comedy, Bad Santa isn't for everyone, but grinches will find it uproariously funny.

[10] Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times gave the film 3+1⁄2 stars out of four, writing how Bad Santa was a "demented, twisted [and] unreasonably funny work of comic kamikaze style".

[11] On October 29, 2015, it was announced that Billy Bob Thornton would return for Bad Santa 2, and that filming would begin in Montreal in January 2016 for a scheduled release of Christmas 2016.

[13] On November 19, 2015, it was announced that Kathy Bates would join the cast as Willie's mother, and that Brett Kelly and Tony Cox would reprise their roles from the first film.