“Home Alone” is turning 35 this year.
The classic Christmas movie premiered in November 1990 and became an immediate hit, launching its star, Macaulay Culkin, into greater levels of fame.
The movie follows a young boy who is accidentally left behind when his family travels to Paris for the holidays and has to protect not only himself, but also his home from a pair of burglars who call themselves the Wet Bandits.
Here are 10 behind-the-scenes secrets from the making of the film, in honor of the 35th anniversary of its release.
‘HOME ALONE’ DIRECTOR FINALLY ANSWERS WHAT THE MCCALLISTERS DID FOR A LIVING
Macaulay Culkin was already making a name for himself before starring as Kevin McCallister in “Home Alone,” but the 1990 movie made him a household name.
The film’s screenwriter, John Hughes, wrote the movie with Culkin in mind. The two worked together on an earlier film, 1989’s “Uncle Buck,” and Hughes was impressed by Culkin’s acting chops.
“John was such a respectful guy as far as the directors he worked with, and I remember him saying — based on ‘Uncle Buck’— [that] Macaulay would be great for this,” director Chris Columbus told Entertainment Weekly in November 2015. “But I think it’s just directorial responsibility [that] I should meet other kids.”
Columbus recalled meeting with “hundreds and hundreds of kids” and watching just as many audition tapes before meeting with Culkin. Following his audition, Columbus was convinced, saying he liked him because he wasn’t like “one of these Hollywood-perfect kids,” adding that “he was really funny.”
One of the most iconic scenes in the movie almost didn’t happen.
When speaking with Entertainment Weekly, Columbus provided insight on the famous scene in which Culkin’s character puts his hands on his cheeks and screams out in pain after applying aftershave.
“That was not written the way Macaulay performed it,” Columbus explained. “I thought he was going to slap on the cologne and move his hands and scream. But on the first take, he slapped his face and kept his hands glued to his face as if he had just put superglue on his face, and his hands stayed completely still as he screamed like the Edvard Munch painting. That’s why he was such an interesting kid: No one else would have done that.”
The director loved the moment so much, it ended up being the expression on Kevin’s face on the movie poster.
When left to his own devices, Kevin sits down in front of the TV with a big bowl of ice cream and starts watching a gangster movie called “Angels with Filthy Souls.”
“Guys, I’m eating junk and watching rubbish! You better come out and stop me!” he yells out, knowing there is no one there to get in the way of his fun.
The film-within-a-film – which includes the memorable line “Keep the change, ya filthy animal” – has become legendary, but the movie itself is not real and was only filmed for the purposes of “Home Alone.”
The clip was filmed the day before filming on “Home Alone” began, and was based off of the 1938 James Cagney film “Angels with Dirty Faces.”
“I believe the title was decided upon only because we needed to create a label for the tape Kevin puts in the VHS player,” art director Dan Webster told Vanity Fair in December 2015. “Now that is a very old-fashioned sentence!”
The adults behind the scenes of the film didn’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings for the sake of a joke.
In one of the scenes, Kevin takes advantage of being alone in the house and starts rummaging through his big brother Buzz’s belongings. In doing so, he finds a picture of Buzz’s girlfriend, and after seeing the photo says, “Buzz, your girlfriend … woof!”
In a 2013 interview with Yahoo, the actor who played Buzz, Devin Ratray, revealed the picture was not of a real young girl.
“They decided it would be unkind to put a girl in that role of just being funny-looking,” Ratray said. “The art director had a son who was more than willing to volunteer for the part. I think if he had known it would become the highest-grossing family comedy of all time, he might have had second thoughts about it.”
The movie wasn’t only a career boost for Culkin, but was a huge success for everyone involved.
Debuting in November 1990, the film held the number one spot for the remainder of the year and into the next, for a total of 12 weeks on top.
It then remained in theaters until late into the summer of 1991, staying in the top 10 until June of that year. Its success in theaters was reflected in the box office numbers, as the film grossed $285.7 million domestically and over $470 million worldwide.
The movie would become the highest-grossing film of 1990 and one of the highest grossing live-action comedies ever. It held the record for 27 years until “Never Say Die” broke it in 2017, according to Time.
Joe Pesci portrayed one of the two burglars who were terrorized by Kevin when they attempted to break into his house.
When rehearsing for one of the scenes, it seems Pesci got a bit too in character and left a permanent mark on Culkin.
“In the first ‘Home Alone,’ they hung me up on a coat hook, and Pesci says, ‘I’m gonna bite all your fingers off, one at a time,’” Culkin told Rule Forty Two in 2004. “And during one of the rehearsals, he bit me, and it broke the skin.”
He told the outlet he still has a scar on his finger from the on-set accident.
The movie’s director almost worked on another classic Christmas movie, but his issues with the film’s star led him to “Home Alone.”
Columbus was first approached by Hughes to direct “Christmas Vacation,” and after directing a series of flops, Columbus was quick to accept the offer, but backed out after meeting the film’s star, Chevy Chase, saying, “I realized I couldn’t work with the guy.”
“First of all, he’s not engaged. He’s treating me like s—. I don’t need this. I’d rather not work again,” he told Variety in December 2024. “I quit ‘Christmas Vacation.’ The next weekend, I got another script from John – and it’s ‘Home Alone.’ ‘Home Alone’ for me was even more personal, a better script, and I thought, I can really do something with this, and I don’t have to deal with Chevy Chase.”
Jeremiah S. Chechik ended up taking over for Columbus to direct “Christmas Vacation.”
When working with a comedy legend, a little improvisation is expected, and working with John Candy was no different, according to Columbus.
“John took those scenes and ran with them,” Columbus told Entertainment Weekly. “We’d do a couple scripted takes and then we would improvise about four or five other takes, and a lot of the improvisation ended up in the film. Whereas something like the church scene was like doing a play — we did it exactly as John had written it.”
The filmmakers were lucky to even be able to have Candy in the film, as due to his busy schedule, they only had 24 hours to film his scenes. In that time, the comedian improvised many scenes.
Columbus recalled him telling Catherine O’Hara’s character about a time he spent all night alone with a corpse in a funeral home, saying, “that just came out of nowhere.”
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Pesci and Daniel Stern made up the duo known as the Wet Bandits who tried and failed to break into the McCallister home with Kevin inside, however Stern almost missed out on being in the film.
In a 2019 episode of the documentary series “The Movies That Made Us,” Stern explained the shooting schedule was changed from six weeks to eight weeks, but there was no pay increase for the additional two weeks.
After Stern walked away, they replaced him with Daniel Roebuck. However, after a few days of rehearsal, Columbus decided he wasn’t right for the part. After offering Stern the part a second time, the actor agreed, and the rest is history.
“What an idiot I was to let that almost get away,” he said in the documentary. “I would have been like, ‘Ooh, I missed it, why? Oh, because of my pigheadedness.’ Thank God they came back to me!”
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Ever since the film’s 1990 release, audiences have been wondering what the McCallister’s did for a living to be able to pay for a trip to Paris for 15 people, including members of their immediate and extended family.
“Back then, John and I had a conversation about it, and we decided on what the jobs were,” Columbus told The Hollywood Reporter’s “Awards Chatter” podcast in December 2024.
“We thought the mother, at the time, because we used mannequins in the basement — I do remember having a conversation — she was a very successful fashion designer. The father could have, based on John Hughes’ own experience, worked in advertising, but I don’t remember what the father did.”
He also dispelled the longstanding rumor that the father was involved in organized crime, explaining that “even though there was, at the time, a lot of organized crime in Chicago,” the father was definitely not involved.
