The film stars Nicolas Cage and Téa Leoni, with Don Cheadle, Saul Rubinek, and Jeremy Piven in supporting roles.
Jack and Kate, who have been together since college, are at JFK Airport, where he is about to leave to take up a twelve-month internship with Barclays in London.
She fears the separation will be detrimental to their relationship and asks him not to go, but he reassures her that their love is strong enough to last and that the internship will be beneficial to their future together.
Thirteen years later, Jack is a wealthy bachelor and Wall Street executive in New York City, with millions at his disposal.
At work, he is putting together a multi-billion dollar merger and has ordered an emergency meeting on Christmas Day, disregarding his employees' desires to spend time with their families.
Cash pulls out a gun, and Jack, trying to defuse the situation, offers to buy the ticket, calling it a “business deal."
Jack wakes up the next morning on Christmas Day in a suburban New Jersey bedroom with Kate and two children.
Although Cash offers to explain what is happening, all he does is make a vague reference to "the organization" and tell Jack that he is getting "a glimpse" of something that will help him to figure out for himself what is important in life.
Jack later apologizes and grows closer to Annie and her baby brother, Josh, and realises he never fell out of love with Kate.
Jack returns to the office to close the big acquisition deal, making plans to fly to Aspen to prevent it from failing, but first visits Kate, now an unmarried corporate lawyer, preparing to move to Paris.
Before Brett Ratner signed on to the project, the film was originally offered to director Curtis Hanson, who accepted.
Like director Ratner, star Nicolas Cage originally wasn't interested in doing a lighthearted romantic comedy drama, as he was focused on more serious and complex roles such as in 8mm and Bringing out the Dead.
He was also exhausted from filming Gone in 60 Seconds, but after seeing Rush Hour with his father, he accepted the part of Jack Campbell after finding himself inspired by Ratner's enthusiasm for the project.
Principal photography began on November 19, 1999, in Teaneck, New Jersey and Sleepy Hollow, New York, where fall foliage was still in evidence.
Academy Award-winning special effects supervisor John Richardson, and his team had to transform the neighborhoods into a winter wonderland to set the snowbound Christmas scene.
The site's consensus states: "The Family Man's earnest attempt to remind audiences that it's a wonderful life too often steers into schmaltz, although Nicolas Cage and Téa Leoni's romantic rapport adds a dash of sincere sweetness.
It wants to prove that everyone needs love..."[8] Emma Cochrane from Empire in 2015 wrote: "This is exactly the kind of adult fantasy you want to see at Christmas and, as such, it's highly enjoyable entertainment", and gave the film three stars out of five.