Michelle Obama's favourite film is Elf because it makes her feel better.

The former US First Lady, 62, has watched the 2003 holiday classic, starring Will Ferrell, 58, as Buddy the Elf, multiple times, and she never gets tired of it.

Taking to Instagram on Wednesday (01.07.26) to announce Ferrell as a guest on the latest episode of the IMO with Michelle Obama and Craig Robinson podcast, she penned: "When I tell people Elf is my favorite movie of all time, I'm not joking!

"So for this week's @imopodcasts, I was especially excited to sit down with Buddy the Elf himself, the one and only Will Ferrell."

Elf follows Buddy, a human raised with elves in the North Pole, who, after learning he is not an elf, travels to New York City at Christmastime to find his unsuspecting biological dad, Walter Hobbs (James Caan).

In the podcast episode, Obama - who is married to 64-year-old ex-US President Barack Obama - declared it as "my favourite movie on the planet of all time" because it is "the only movie that I watch again and again and again".

Later on, Ferrell revealed that Elf was one of the reasons why he quit the NBC sketch comedy show Saturday Night Live in 2002.

The comedian explained: "I left, I'd been there seven years, and you have to leave at some point.

"And it just felt like I'd had enough momentum, but it's not like I had a stack of scripts waiting for me.

"But we were developing this one movie about a human who was raised by elves at the North Pole, and it was an amazing concept, but it needed a lot of work. And so we kind of rewrote the whole thing."

The film, directed by Jon Favreau, 59, was a major commercial success, grossing $228.9 million at the worldwide box office against a $33 million budget.

And 23 years later, Elf remains as popular as ever, which Ferrell is blown away by.

He said: "But it's such an interesting thing to have become what it's become only because two weeks of filming - I'm sitting in New York in my little tiny trailer, because that was one of my first bigger movies, but it was still a little tiny trailer, looking in a mirror dressed as Buddy the Elf in my yellow tights going, 'Buddy, this could be the end right here. This is either a home run or a complete strikeout, and people are going to be like, 'What happened to the guy on SNL? He's pretty funny.''

"So I had no idea that we had like lightning in a bottle, but we did."

Obama once again said that Elf "is my favourite movie of all time".

She added: "I mean, it really is. I don't re-watch movies, but it is hilarious every other second. And it is so sweet. And it definitely does all the things. It presses all of the buttons.

"So whenever I want to feel better - no, literally - and then I make other people watch it with me so that I can say, 'Wait, here it comes.'

"It is a thing for a reason."