Home Alone
Home Alone is a 1990 American Christmas comedy film directed by Chris Columbus and written and produced by John Hughes. The first film in the Home Alone franchise, the film stars Macaulay Culkin, Joe Pesci, Daniel Stern, John Heard, and Catherine O'Hara. Culkin plays Kevin McCallister, a boy who defends his suburban Chicago home from a home invasion by a pair of robbers after his family accidentally leaves him behind on their Christmas vacation to Paris.
This article is about the first film in the series. For the series, see Home Alone (franchise). For other uses, see Home Alone (disambiguation).
Hughes conceived Home Alone while on vacation, with Warner Bros. being originally intended to finance and distribute the film. However, Warner Bros. shut down the production after it exceeded its assigned budget. 20th Century Fox assumed responsibilities following secret meetings with Hughes. Columbus and Culkin were hired soon afterwards. Filming took place between February and May 1990 on location across Illinois.
Home Alone premiered in Chicago on November 10, 1990, and was theatrically released in the United States on November 16. While the film's reception was initially mixed, in later years reception has been generally positive, with praise for its cast, humor, and music. Home Alone grossed $476.7 million worldwide, becoming the highest-grossing live-action comedy until the release of The Hangover Part II (2011), and made Culkin a child star. Moreover, it was the second-highest-grossing film of 1990, behind Ghost.[4] It was nominated for the Golden Globe Award for Best Motion Picture – Musical or Comedy, and Best Actor in a Motion Picture – Musical or Comedy for Culkin, and for the Academy Award for Best Original Score for John Williams, and Best Original Song for "Somewhere in My Memory". Home Alone has since been considered one of the best Christmas films.[5][6] A sequel, Home Alone 2: Lost in New York, was released in 1992.
In 2023, Home Alone was selected for preservation in the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".[7]
Plot
The McCallister family is preparing to spend Christmas in Paris, gathering at Kate and Peter's home in a Chicago suburb on the night before their departure. Kate and Peter's youngest son, Kevin, is ridiculed by his siblings and cousins due to his immaturity. Kevin inadvertently ruins the family dinner after a scuffle with his oldest brother Buzz, in which Kevin's airplane ticket is unknowingly thrown away, resulting in Kate sending him up to the attic. Kevin berates his mother for allowing the rest of the family to pick on him and wishes that his family would disappear. During the night, heavy winds create a power outage, disabling the alarm clocks and causing the family to oversleep. In the confusion and rush to get to the airport, Kevin is accidentally left behind.
Kevin wakes to find the house empty and the family cars still in the garage, unaware that they had rented vans to take them to the airport. Thinking that his wish has come true, he is overjoyed with his newfound freedom. Later, Kevin becomes frightened by his next-door neighbor, "Old Man" Marley, rumored to be a serial killer who murdered his own family. The McCallister home is soon stalked by the "Wet Bandits", Harry and Marv, a pair of burglars who have been breaking into other vacant houses in the neighborhood. Kevin tricks them into thinking that his family is still home, forcing them to postpone their plans to rob the McCallister house.
Kate realizes mid-flight that Kevin was left behind, and upon arrival in Paris, the family discovers that all flights for the next two days are booked, and that the phone lines are still down back home in Chicago. Peter and the rest of the family stay in his brother's apartment in Paris, while Kate manages to get a flight back to Scranton, Pennsylvania. She fails to find a flight to Chicago, but meets Gus Polinski, the lead member of a traveling polka band, who offers to let her travel with them to Chicago in a moving van.
On Christmas Eve, Harry and Marv finally realize that only Kevin is in the McCallister home, and Kevin overhears them discussing plans to break into the house that night. Kevin starts to miss his family and asks the local Santa Claus impersonator if he could bring them back for Christmas. He goes to church and watches a choir perform, eventually re-encountering Marley, who proves the rumors about him are false. Marley points out his granddaughter in the choir and mentions he has never met her since she is the daughter of his estranged son. Kevin suggests Marley should reconcile with his son.
Kevin returns home and rigs the house with booby traps. Harry and Marv break in, spring the traps, and suffer various injuries. Kevin calls the police and lures the duo into a vacant neighboring house that they had previously broken into. Harry and Marv ambush Kevin and prepare to get their revenge, but Marley intervenes and knocks them out with his snow shovel. The police arrive and arrest Harry and Marv, having identified all the houses that they broke into due to their habit of flooding them.
On Christmas Day, Kevin is initially disappointed to find that his family is still gone, but Kate arrives home, and they reconcile. The rest of the family then returns after waiting in Paris for a direct flight to Chicago. Kevin keeps silent about his encounter with Harry and Marv, although Peter finds Harry's knocked-out gold tooth. Kevin then happily watches Marley reuniting with his son, daughter-in-law, and granddaughter.
Production
Development
Writer and producer John Hughes conceived Home Alone while preparing to go on vacation. He said: "I was going away on vacation, and making a list of everything I didn't want to forget. I thought, 'Well, I'd better not forget my kids.' Then I thought, 'What if I left my 10-year-old son at home? What would he do?'"[8] Hughes wrote eight pages of notes that developed into the screenplay.[8] Imagining that children are naturally most scared of robbers, Hughes also worked that aspect into the plot of the film.[8]
Home Alone was initially set to be financed and distributed by Warner Bros. Hughes promised that he could make the movie for less than $10 million, considerably less than most feature film production budgets of that era. Concerned that the film might exceed that amount, Hughes met secretly with 20th Century Fox before production to see if they would fund the project if Warner proved inflexible. According to executive producer Scott Rosenfelt, a copy of the script was "clandestinely" delivered to Fox, bypassing the legal restrictions that would have otherwise prevented Fox from seeing it until the project was in turnaround.[9] Early in production, the budget grew to $14.7 million. Warner demanded that it be cut by $1.2 million; the producers responded with a memo arguing that the budget could not be cut any further. Unconvinced, Warner shut down production the next day, but it quickly resumed when Fox took up Hughes on his offer. The final budget grew to $18 million.[9]
Hughes had asked Patrick Read Johnson to direct, but he was committed to directing Spaced Invaders (1990).[10] He turned to Chris Columbus, who had left National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation (1989) before shooting started because of a personality clash with starring actor Chevy Chase, who Columbus said treated him "like dirt".[11] Hughes gave him the scripts for both Home Alone and Reach the Rock (1998); Columbus chose to direct Home Alone, as he found it funnier and liked the Christmas theme.[12][13] Columbus did an uncredited rewrite of the script; among his contributions was the character of Old Man Marley, which he created to give the story a more serious layer, as well as a more emotional, happier ending.[14]
Release
Home media
Home Alone was first released by Fox Video on VHS and LaserDisc in the United States on August 22, 1991,[44] their first video to go direct to sell-through rather than to the video rental market first.[45] It sold 11 million copies, generating Fox revenue of $150 million[46] making it, along with E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, the highest-selling video of all time at that point.[45] Due to the sales, the film did not perform as well in the rental market.[45]
It was later released on DVD on October 5, 1999, as a basic package.[47] The film was released on Blu-ray on December 2, 2008, titled Family Fun Edition,[48] and was released alongside Home Alone 2: Lost in New York in a collection pack on October 5, 2010.[49] The film was reissued again on DVD and Blu-ray on October 6, 2015, alongside all four of its sequels in a box set titled Home Alone: 25th Anniversary Ultimate Collector's Christmas Edition.[50]
On September 15, 2020, Walt Disney Studios Home Entertainment and 20th Century Studios Home Entertainment released Home Alone on Ultra HD Blu-ray in time for its 30th anniversary in the United States.[51]
Reception
Box office
Home Alone grossed $285.8 million in the United States and Canada and $190.9 million in other countries for a worldwide total of $476.7 million, against a production budget of $18 million.[3] In its opening weekend, Home Alone grossed $17 million from 1,202 theaters, averaging $14,211 per site and just 6% of the final total and added screens over the next six weeks, with a peak screen count of 2,174 during its eighth weekend at the start of January 1991.[52]
Home Alone was the number-one film at the box office for 12 consecutive weeks, from its release weekend of November 16–18, 1990 through the weekend of February 1–3, 1991.[53][52] It was removed from the top spot when Sleeping with the Enemy opened with $13 million.[52] It remained in the top ten until the weekend of April 26, well past Easter weekend. It made two more appearances in the top ten (the weekend of May 31 – June 2 and the weekend of June 14–16) before finally falling out of the top ten.[54] After over nine months into its run, the film had earned 16x its debut weekend and ended up making a final gross of $285,761,243, the top-grossing film of its year in North America.[55] The film is listed in the Guinness World Records as the highest-grossing live-action comedy ever[56] and held the record until it was overtaken by The Hangover Part II in 2011.[57]
By the time the film had run its course in theaters, Home Alone was the third-highest-grossing film of all time worldwide, as well as in the United States and Canada behind only Star Wars ($322 million at the time) and E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial ($399 million at the time), according to the home video box. Box Office Mojo estimates that the film sold over 67.7 million tickets in the United States.[3] It was also the highest-grossing Christmas film until it was surpassed by Dr. Seuss' The Grinch in 2018.[58][59] The film made Culkin a child star.[60]
Critical response
On review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds an approval rating of 66% based on 116 reviews, with an average rating of 5.9/10. The website's critical consensus reads, "Home Alone's uneven but frequently funny premise stretched unreasonably thin is buoyed by Macaulay Culkin's cute performance and strong supporting stars."[61] On Metacritic, the film has a weighted average score of 63 out of 100 based on nine critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews".[62] Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "A" on an A+ to F scale.[63]
Variety magazine praised the film for its cast.[64] Jeanne Cooper of The Washington Post praised the film for its comedic approach.[65] Hal Hinson, also of The Washington Post, praised Columbus' direction and Culkin's performance.[66] Although Caryn James of The New York Times complained that the film's first half is "flat and unsurprising as its cute little premise suggests", she praised the second half for its slapstick humor. She also praised the dialogue between Kevin and Marley, as well as the film's final scenes.[67] Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times gave the film a 2+1⁄2 out of a 4-star rating and 2 thumbs down. He compared the elaborate booby-traps in the film to Rube Goldberg machines, writing "they're the kinds of traps that any 8-year-old could devise, if he had a budget of tens of thousands of dollars and the assistance of a crew of movie special effects people" and criticized the plot as "so implausible that it makes it hard for [him] to really care about the plight of the kid [Kevin]". However, he praised Culkin's performance.[68]
Owen Gleiberman of Entertainment Weekly magazine gave the film a "D" grade, criticizing the film for its "sadistic festival of adult-bashing". Gleiberman said that "[John] Hughes is pulling our strings as though he'd never learn to do anything else".[69] Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian gave the film three out of five and praised Culkin's "vivid screen presence, almost incandescent with confidence". However, he criticised his acting, calling it "a bit broad and mannered".[60] Ali Barclay of the BBC wrote, "Culkin walks a fine line between annoyance and endearment throughout the film." He also called Home Alone "a film which manages to capture some of the best qualities of Christmas".[70]
Naomi Barnwell of Roobla said that "Home Alone has all the ingredients that make for a great kids' film".[71] Adrian Turner of Radio Times commented, "[Home Alone is] a celebration of enterprise that captured the heart and wickedness of every child on the planet."[72] According to TV Guide, "[Home Alone]'s slapstick falls flat and only the pain remains."[73] Marielle Sabbag of Vocal wrote "Everything about [Home Alone] is beautiful and has a realistic quality."[74] Peter Rainer of the Los Angeles Times criticised the fact that "there is a reason why this film plays better as a trailer than as a full-length film".[75]
Home Alone gradually became a Christmas classic.[76][77][78][79] It was praised for its quotable phrases,[80] morals,[81] traps,[82] and main character.[83] Hannah-Rose Yee of Stylist called the ending "very sweet" and praised the score from John Williams, calling it "fantastic".[84] Christopher Hooton of The Independent also praised the film, calling the film-within-a-film Angels with Filthy Souls "a fond footnote in cinema history".[85] Matt Talbot from Simcoe.com said that the Wet Bandits were "fantastic" and "never [got] old" on "repeat viewings".[86] Michael Walsh of Nerdist noted the church scene as "One of the best, most touching scenes [in the film]".[87]
Home Alone remains a highly popular Christmas movie in Poland, when it is played on Polsat every Christmas Eve. In 2010, Polsat did not play Home Alone, which caused over 90,000 people to protest on Facebook.[88] In 2016, over 4.44 million Poles tuned in to Polsat to watch Home Alone. Since the 2010s, its TV trailers even include a tagline that acknowledges this popularity: "Christmas without him? It's absolutely impossible!".[89] The movie is also highly popular in Romania, been played by Pro TV since 1995, except 2021 when the movie was played by Antena 1. In 2014, over 2,7 million Romanians watched the movie on Pro Tv.
Julio Macat, the film's cinematographer, considers Home Alone his favorite film out of all the projects he has shot. It was the favorite film of former U.S. President Gerald Ford.[90]
Accolades
At the 12th Youth in Film Awards, Macaulay Culkin won Best Young Actor Starring in a Motion Picture.[91] The film was nominated for two Academy Awards, one for Best Original Score, which was written by John Williams, and the other for Best Original Song for "Somewhere in My Memory", music by Williams and lyrics by Leslie Bricusse, but lost to Dances with Wolves and Dick Tracy respectively.[92][93]
Use in media
The music video for Snoop Dogg's 1994 song "Gin and Juice" opens with a gag where, after a teenaged Snoop's parents have left him to watch the house in their absence, he places his hands to his face and yells in the manner of Kevin McCallister in the first film, while a title comes on screen reading "Home Boy Alone".[108]
In December 2015, Culkin reprised his role as an adult Kevin McCallister in the inaugural episode of the Jack Dishel web series "DRYVRS", in which a visibly disturbed McCallister recounts his experiences from the events of the first film and subsequently uses his signature tactics against a gunman.[109] In response, Daniel Stern posted a short video reprising his role as Marv, released in conjunction with Stern's Reddit AMA, pleading for support from Harry against McCallister's traps.[110]
The 2016 Christmas-set horror film Better Watch Out includes a scene where a character who is obsessed with the Home Alone films demonstrates how, in real life, it would be deadly for someone to be hit in the face with a paint can swung from a distance.[111]
The season 13 episode of It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, "Charlie's Home Alone", is intended to be a direct parody of the first Home Alone film. In the episode Charlie Kelly is accidentally forgotten while the rest of "the gang" attend Super Bowl LII. Charlie mistakingly believes he must protect the bar by setting up traps, only for himself to accidentally activate said traps, nearly preventing from performing his Super Bowl "rituals".[112]
On December 15, 2018, Culkin made a guest appearance as himself in an episode of The Angry Video Game Nerd to review multiple video game adaptations of the first two Home Alone films, as well as a gameplay session of The Pagemaster with James Rolfe and Mike Matei in the days following that episode's release.[113]
On December 19, 2018, Culkin again reprised his role as McCallister in a 60-second advertisement for Google Assistant titled Home Alone Again, which parodies the original film. The commercial contains shot for shot remakes of several scenes from the film in which McCallister uses several of the product's functions. The concluding scene involves a command sequence intended to make the house look active, parodying the original Rockin' Around the Christmas Tree scene.[114]
The 2022 action comedy film Violent Night references Home Alone several times, and character Trudy Lightston attempts to emulate Kevin McCallister's fighting tactics against the burglars who take her family hostage.
Use in Poland
Films such as Home Alone and Die Hard (1988) are very popular at Christmas time in Poland, because they were some of the first Western movies to be released in Poland since the end of communist rule.[115][116][117] However, the Polish premiere of Home Alone took place not during the Christmas season, but on May 22, 1992.[118] Three years later, on Christmas Day (December 25), 1995, at 20:10 CET on TVP1, the Polish television premiere of the film took place. Then three times on December 26, 1997, and December 24 and 25, 1999, the film was broadcast on television TVN.[119] On December 29, 2000, 8.9 million Poles were watching Home Alone on Christmas Eve;[120] by 2017, about four million people (11.6% of Poland's population) were watching it on Christmas Eve and in 2018 again on the same day the film recorded the highest viewership with 4.51 million viewers.[121]
Other media
Novelization
Home Alone (ISBN 0-590-55066-7) was novelized by Todd Strasser and published by Scholastic in 1990 to coincide with the film.[122] On October 6, 2015, to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the movie, an illustrated book (ISBN 1-594-74858-6) by Kim Smith and Quirk Books was released.[123][124]