During the interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Home Alone creator Chris Columbus and actor Macaulay Culkin got brutally honest about why the Home Alone sequels turned into such a mess.
The director didn’t mince words when talking to The Hollywood Reporter before a special screening at the Academy Museum. He went straight ahead and said the people behind the later movies “fu**ed it up.”
Chris Columbus said, “It’s been revisited with really bad sequels. Sorry to insult anybody, but they’ve completely fucked it up. It started with Home Alone 3 and then it just went downhill from there; Home Alone 3 is sort of the best of the bunch of the bad movies.”
That’s not exactly a ringing endorsement. Calling Home Alone 3 the best of the bad sequels is like saying it’s the tallest dwarf in a lineup of disasters.
Culkin went ahead and also pointed out the obvious, the later films didn’t have him or Columbus, which explains a lot about why they flopped. It’s hard to make a Home Alone movie work when the actual kid from Home Alone isn’t home alone anymore.
But here’s where things get interesting. Culkin has an idea for another sequel, and it’s pretty clever. He imagines an older Kevin McCallister as a widower struggling to connect with his own kid while working nonstop. The whole setup would mirror what his mom went through in the original film, except this time Kevin’s the one screwing up.
Culkin described his idea: “I like the idea that maybe Kevin’s older, that he’s like a widower or something like that. He’s raising his kid, and they don’t really get along, he’s working all the time… it’s almost like a Liar, Liar kind of thing. There’s one of two ways you can do it. One, he actually leaves the kid behind by mistake. He calls up his mom like, ‘So sorry, I get it now.’ Or I leave him behind on purpose, like, ‘Oh, that made me the man I am today.'”
The real genius kicks in when Culkin describes what happens next. The kid would lock Kevin out of his own house and set up elaborate traps, the same kind Kevin used on those bumbling burglars Marv and Harry back in the day.
Culkin said: “Then he locks me out of the house, and he’s setting up traps and things like that. And I think I see them coming because, you know, I’m the expert. It also explains why I don’t call the police or locksmith because I’m embarrassed my kid is beating me and this is my gig. And I think the house would be kind of a metaphor for getting back into the kid’s heart kind of thing.”
It’s surprisingly thoughtful for what could easily be another cheap cash grab. Kevin would see the traps coming because he invented the playbook, but he wouldn’t call the cops or a locksmith. Why? Pure embarrassment and pride. He can’t admit his own kid is outsmarting him at his own game.
Columbus has heard hundreds of sequel pitches over the years, which makes sense given how much money the franchise has made. But he’s clear about what it would take to get him back: Culkin, Joe Pesci, and Daniel Stern all need to be involved. He’s not optimistic about that happening, though.
The director once toyed with his own idea where Harry and Marv get out of prison years later, bitter and furious, ready for revenge against Kevin. Except when they show up, they’d have to deal with Kevin’s kid instead.
Columbus said: “They’re bitter, they’re angry, and they want revenge. And who do they want revenge on? Macaulay. And at that point, I thought Macaulay could have a kid, sort of Kevin’s age, and it would be his own kid dealing with these two guys. I don’t think Joe Pesci would be interested. I haven’t seen Dan Stern since 1992. I don’t know if he would be interested.”
There’s something sad about Columbus’s final take on it all. He said you can’t recreate the magic of those first two films because so much of it came down to that specific cast at that particular age during that particular moment in time. Columbus said: “The problem is when you’re doing a film like this, a lot of it is really based on cast; part of it is based on the cast at that age, at that particular time, and I don’t think you can duplicate that.”
The original Home Alone worked because it was genuine. A kid, a house, some burglars, and a family that actually felt real. Everything after that tried to copy the formula without understanding what made it special in the first place. Columbus knows it, Culkin knows it, and after watching any of those later sequels, the audience definitely knows it too.
