If Home Alone ever gets another sequel, don’t expect Chris Columbus to be involved.
The Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone filmmaker, who helmed the 1990 Christmas classic and its 1992 sequel Home Alone 2: Lost in New York, told Entertainment Tonight that he doesn’t think the franchise should persist.
20th Century Fox Film Corp/Courtesy Everett
Chris Columbus and Macaulay Culkin on the set of ‘Home Alone 2: Lost in New York’ in 1992
“It was a very special moment, and you can’t really recapture that,” Columbus said. “I think it’s a mistake to try to go back and try to recapture something we did 35 years ago. I think it should be left alone.”
The filmmaker justified making Lost in New York by highlighting its proximity to the original movie. “That was immediate, so we had the same cast and everyone was about the same age,” he told the outlet.
Elsewhere in the interview, Columbus noted that he didn’t expect the original Home Alone to maintain an audience 35 years later. “We wanted people to still enjoy the movie 20 years down the road, but we had no concept that it would still be sort of this locomotive that keeps going after all these years,” he explained. “It’s a very nostalgic experience for a lot of people, which is great.”
The original Home Alone grossed $476 million at the global box office on an $18 million budget, making it one of the highest-earning movies of the 1990s. Lost in New York was also a massive hit, earning over $350 million globally on a $28 million budget.
However, the franchise continued with several more entries without the involvement of Columbus, star Macaulay Culkin, or any of the other primary cast members from the first two films. 1998’s Home Alone 3 made just $79 million on a $32 million budget, which prompted the next entries — 2002’s Home Alone 4 and 2012’s Home Alone: The Holiday Heist — to premiere on ABC and Freeform, respectively, without theatrical releases.
20th Century Fox Film Corp/Courtesy Everett
Macaulay Culkin in ‘Home Alone’
Most recently, Disney produced 2021’s Home Sweet Home Alone for Disney+, which could be written off as an unrelated standalone movie if not for one small wrinkle: Devin Ratray, who played the older brother of Culkin’s Kevin in the first two movies, portrayed a police officer with the same name as his original character, Buzz McAllister, suggesting that the movie is technically a sequel to the original films rather than a reboot.
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There are no immediate plans to continue the Home Alone franchise at this point. However, at a Q&A event in December 2024, Culkin casually pitched his idea for a potential follow-up.
“I’m kind of almost like an absentee dad, and my kid locks me out,” the actor said at a screening of the original movie at NJPAC in Newark, N.J., according to NJ.com. “Then he sets up the traps and I’m trying to get back in. The house would be a metaphor for … I’m breaking into my son’s heart. So, generally speaking, yes … it depends on the script and stuff like that. But that’d be fun. I mean, nothing could be anything worse than the last one, right?”
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