Home Alone Made $476 Million. It's Still a Missing-Child Case With Paint Cans
The 1990 hit held a box-office record for 21 years. It's also about a family that loses a child, and a child who tortures burglars.
By the Heckle Desk · · 2 min read
Home Alone opened on November 16, 1990, made $476.7 million worldwide on an $18 million budget, and spent 21 years as the highest-grossing live-action comedy in the Guinness book, until The Hangover Part II took the title in 2011. Domestically it held on until Barbie in 2023. It airs every December the way the flu does, and I've come to feel about the same way about both.
The critics were never quite as sold as the public. Rotten Tomatoes has it at 66 percent. Metacritic says 63. Roger Ebert gave it two and a half stars out of four, liked Macaulay Culkin, and said the plot was too implausible to care about. A movie that grosses half a billion dollars on a two-and-a-half-star review is not a masterpiece. It's a very good real-estate deal.
Start with the premise, which everyone has agreed to stop thinking about. The McCallisters, of the large Chicago-suburb house with a staircase built for a cathedral, are flying to Paris for Christmas. A power outage resets the alarm clocks, they oversleep, and in the scramble they leave Kevin, eight years old, asleep in the attic, where he'd been banished after a dinner argument. The head count gets botched. On a trip to France. You have to count the luggage to get it on the plane; the children apparently travel on the honor system.
Then the movie asks you to find it heartwarming that Kate, the mother, gets home by way of Dallas and Scranton. It is heartwarming, the way a long ambulance ride is heartwarming. Meanwhile the father stays in Paris, at his brother's apartment, waiting on a flight. I've known men who'd wait on a flight while their house burned down, and none of them were held up as family-movie heroes.
And Kevin himself is not a lovable scamp. He's a small, gifted sadist. Harry and Marv, the Wet Bandits played by Joe Pesci and Daniel Stern, are burglars, sure, but what they suffer in that house would end any real person's life several times over: irons to the face, a blowtorch to the scalp, a paint can swung down a staircase. Ebert compared the traps to Rube Goldberg machines, which is a kind way to describe attempted murder with a pulley. The stunts were so rough the final ones were shot without harnesses, because the harnesses showed on camera. The movie got the bruises right and the consequences wrong.
The best part of the movie, frankly, is the part nobody quotes: Old Man Marley, played by Roberts Blossom, the neighbor a rumor turned into a murderer, who turns out to be a lonely man estranged from his son. Chris Columbus added him to give the picture a heart. It's telling that the heart had to be brought in from next door.
Culkin earned $110,000 for the first one and $4.5 million for the sequel, which is the only part of the franchise where an adult acted responsibly toward him.
A family movie that makes you laugh at neglect and cheer for a beating is a fine thing to watch once a year. Twice, and you start leaving your own kids in the attic just to see what they'll build.