Fans aren’t as excited about ‘Home Alone’ remake as Disney’s bank
Home Alone (1990) was an unexpectedly huge hit. The family-friendly film features a young boy, absurdly left alone by accident during Christmas vacation, who tortures bumbling burglars with creative and ridiculous contraptions for an hour and half. Home Alone gives children & adults alike dopamine from its revenge fantasy and satisfying bloodlust from its crude slapstick.
Despite its low-brow approach, the original Home Alone is undoubtedly possesses a perfectly constructed beat sheet which hits its mark with tension and release as any great genre piece should.
Highlights of Home Alone include the Wet Bandits (Daniel Stern & Joe Pesci), whose performances simultaneously make you chuckle (against your will at times) but also come off genuinely threatening; Kevin’s faked party to the tune of “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree”; and an old guy with a shovel everyone thinks killed his whole family.
The first two Home Alone installments are the only ones worth your time, but the franchise goes like this: Home Alone, Home Alone 2: Lost in New York, Home Alone 3, Home Alone 4: Taking Back the House, and Home Alone: The Holiday Heist.
The sequels that eschew Macaulay Culkin as the iconic protective troublemaker Kevin McAllister are rarely referenced and seldom watched, for good reason. News that a Home Alone remake is on the way therefore gained attention more for the long gap between HA 5 and this new film than any sequel would have.
The Home Alone remake’s team & stars
We don’t know yet who Disney has in mind to star in the new how or when the new Home Alone would be remade, or who would be cast. But that won’t stop us from speculating.
What the interwebz think about the Home Alone remake in development
Disney CEO Bob Iger calls the Home Alone remake a “reimagining”. It forms only a tiny sliver of the library of 21st Century Fox recently aquired by the entertainment giant. The new Disney+ streaming service will be its likely home. Hopefully they don’t need a psychotic eight-year-old to protect that new service.
Macauley Culkin had a compatriot shoot his bingewatching portrait meant to illustrate his readiness to watch the upcoming Home Alone at his own home. The FilmCraft writers room was surprised to see such an ugly sofa there.
Despite rising hopes for the Home Alone remake, it’s not likely we’ll see Culkin reprise his famous role. However, the performer did recently reprise Kevin McAllister in a viral Google Assistant ad.
Home Alone did $476 million in the box office worldwide and became a cinematic Christmas flick. But the public has shown a mix of curiosity and eye-rolling irony given the last three installments of the Home Alone saga.
Audiences are sick of remakes
In case you needed a reminder of the dearth of creativity in Hollywood production offices, you need only review the slew of remakes and reboots to have been thoughtlessly churned out by the studio machine in the last 20 years. So few original ideas have originated in that scene, and box office numbers reflect the lack of interest the path of regurgitation inevitably has wrought.
From a business perspective, of course it’s imperative for a studio to maximize its investment in a successful franchise. And indeed, it is technically possible that a reboot can outshine the original, by highlighting aspects of the story underexplored beforehand or even simply superb execution with a different vision.
Fans of the original mostly find the idea of making a remake superfluous.
Come on, Hollywood. Home Alone is a classic – get some new ideas! There are so many new script writers out there who can’t catch a break: new stories, new voices. Sigh.
This is something that should just be left alone. There’s no need for a remake. The first two are classics and the rest in the series are trash.
New technology paradigms of the 21st century
One large issue of a Home Alone remake is the communications upheaval in the direction of extreme swiftness seen in the past thirty years. The idea of a child being left at home while the rest of his family are stuck in a car without a single means of mobile communication is laughably absurd in this day and age.
So the remake will need to rework Home Alone‘s premise to account for this lack of communications. Will it be a wayward solar flare knocking out satellites for 36 hours? What about a nigh-supernatural sudden breaking of the McAllister’s cellular devices? Or perhaps they simply decide on an analog vacation and leave all their comms in a locked safe for the duration of their Christmas vacation.
Definitely not happy about a Home Alone remake. I don’t understand why you’d mess with a classic like that. Also, how does that even work? Couldn’t the parents just text the neighbours or something?
Act 1: “Did we leave Kevin at home?”
Also Act 1: “Yeah FaceTime him and make sure he’s okay”
The end.
Tap into that creativity, Disney!
If you’re gonna do a reboot of a real classic, the director has to really stretch to make a statement. New ideas, new cast, new premise, new details. Horror-comedy? Why not. The original was already heading in that direction with its not-so-hidden sadistic handling of the bumbling robbers.
If they work hard enough on a great script, we bet Disney could even get Macaulay on the project. For example, Kevin has become a high-powered corporate magnate who dominates every gathering he’s at. Control freak Kevin even plans the whole vacation out against the McAllister’s easy-going wishes. So they abandon him at their old home to teach him a lesson.
Or lean into the gore and make Kevin even more of a little psychopath. Throw in a larger team of thieves and you have the perfect setup for him to pick them off one by one as the audience is stunned by his violent brutality and heartlessness.
I hope it’s more of a remake along the lines of Mary Poppins Returns, which IMO takes the original and pays a lot of homage, but manages to be its own thing. It sounds like it’s straight to video, so at least we’ll all get to judge for ourselves once it hits. I’m not optimistic, but we’ll see . . . .
[Culkin] should play Kevin: still living in his parents’ basement, only they’ve forgotten that he lives in their basement and have moved away. The “robbers” are actually the new family who bought the house.
The [Home Alone reboot] ends with Kevin brutally murdering the family with whimsical Saw-esque traps and then surviving on the remains, because he’s too traumatized from decades of neglect at the hands of his parents to feel safe leaving the house.
We’ll call it Home Alone?. Coming Christmas 2020. The reboot to murder all reboots.
No, no – it should totally be this: after the last time he was left Home Alone, Kevin was never the same. Years of suppressing his lust for battle has left Kevin a shell of his former self – that is, until one morning he woke up in a strange place with no idea how he got there. Macaulay Culkin stars in Dungeon Alone. When you don’t have a body, no one can hear you scream! A Dungeon Core LitRPG adventure
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The internet has spoken, and it’s pretty salty about the potential Home Alone Remake. The classic plot wouldn’t make sense today, and if it’s set in the past, it’ll only remind us how superior the original was. Like most remakes, Home Alone 6 seems completely unnecessary – but when has that ever stopped Hollywood before? Good luck, ya filthy animals.
