Home Alone became an instant classic when it was released in 1990, but the beloved Christmas-time comedy nearly failed to make it out of the starting gate.
The family-friendly film that tells the story of a young boy who is mistakenly left alone by his family in their suburban home over the holidays, was the brainchild of the late John Hughes, whose teen-centric movies established a new genre of storytelling in the 1980s.
Hughes wrote the script to see if he could create for kids the kind of movie he’d been successfully making for a slightly older audience.
Hughes took his script to Warner Bros. who told him he could make it for $10 million, expecting, at best, a moderately successful film.
When the film, which was in pre-production at the time, told the studio it would cost at least $14.7million to make the movie, Warner Bros. shut it down.
The cast and crew were told in the same morning that the shoot was being closed down, their jobs were over and that 20th Century Fox had picked up the film and things were actually moving forward as planned.
The 1990 film became an instant holiday classic despite almost getting canned before production even started
Some of the people involved with production recall that the day after the double-announcement, the crew came to work and found 20th Century Fox T-shirts on every chair.
Producers and others involved with production recounted in a Netflix documentary about the making of the movie that the script was ‘clandestinely delivered’ to Fox executives, who legally were not supposed to have seen anything relating to the film.
The documentary, ‘The Movies That Made Us: Home Alone,’ included insight from the then-very green director Chris Columbus, who described the rookie-ish team of filmmakers saddled with doing the job.
Home Alone was shot in-and-around the suburbs of Chicago, where Hughes liked to do a lot of his movie-making away from the Hollywood studio system.
The team set up home base at New Trier High School in Winnetka, where eventually a set was built that became the iconic interior of the McCallister’s idyllic house.
They also worked around the clock to find what would become the iconic brick house that came to represent a specific kind of upper-middle-class American life for the next decade.
The house, according to the director, needed to be ‘warm and inviting’ in order to effectively create the right kind of holiday spirit for the film.
‘I’m just obsessed with Christmas,’ said Columbus in the documentary.
Casting for the film also needed to be handled somewhat carefully. Not only was a nine-year-old being chosen to lead a feature-length film, but adult casting also required a light touch in order to make the family who left their son home alone not seem horrible.
The movie, which launched essentially all involved into successful careers, was canceled by Warner Bros. when it went over budget. It was subsequently picked up by 20th Century Fox, which was willing to give production the modest budget it required
The family-friendly film that tells the story of a young boy who is mistakenly left alone by his family in their suburban home over the holidays and his effort to thwart neighborhood burglars
The large suburban home in Chicago where the McCallisters lived was hand selected with care and has become an iconic image of upper-middleclass American life
Macaulay Culkin’s Kevin McCallister uses his family’s home as a weapon against neighborhood ne’er-do-wells, the Wet Bandits
Director Chris Columbus was, at the time of filming, a very green director who was really hoping to tell a warm, funny, family story
John Hughes, the iconic filmmaker who established the genre of the teen comedy in the 1980s, wrote Home Alone and saw it through its tricky production process
Macaulay Culkin was pre-selected for his part, which would become easily his most famous role, after his performance in 1989’s family comedy ‘Uncle Buck,’ which he starred in alongside John Candy.
Candy, a celebrated comedic actor and improvisation star also appeared briefly in the film as ‘the Pola King of the Midwest,’ a role for which he improvised every line.
Though Candy wielded considerable star power at the time, he was paid at scale – just a few hundred dollars – for his time filming, which was only about a day.
Casting the part of Marv – one of the two Wet Bandits, the burglar bad guys against whom Macaulay’s Kevin McCallister must defend his home – was also an extensive process.
Daniel Stern was originally cast in the Warner Bros. backed version of the film, but when the shoot turned out to be double as long as he was initially told it would be, and the studio wouldn’t increase his salary, he walked away from the part.
Comedic actor Dan Roebuck was then cast, but when principal shooting was kicking off, it became clear to all involved that the new Marv and Joe Pesci – who had been cast as Harry Lime, the other Wet Bandit – were not a chemistry match.
It was then that director Chris Columbus realized they needed to make an appeal to Stern to come back and do the shoot.
He did and while being interviewed for the documentary said it would have been an unbelievable mistake to turn it down for the second time, adding that people get his face tattooed on their arms because of his Home Alone character.
Daniel Stern (left) who played Marv in the movie, almost turned down the part twice after Warner Bros. wouldn’t raise his salary for an extended shoot
Stern was initially replaced by Dan Roebuck (pictured), but once on set it was clear that Joe Pesci, who plays the film’s other villain, was not a chemistry match with Roebuck, a second appeal was made to Stern
Macaulay Culkin was pre-selected for his part, which would become easily his most famous role, after his performance in 1989’s family comedy ‘Uncle Buck,’ which he starred in alongside John Candy
The movie came out just before Thanksgiving in 1990 and was up against Rocky V at the box office. It did not receive positive reviews from George Siskel and Roger Ebert, the foremost movie critics of the time.
According to the studio’s calculations, if the movie made $8 million in its opening weekend, it would have been a success.
The movie made $17 million during its first weekend out and remained the number one movie at the box office for 12 weeks after – all the way through the holiday season.
Its domestic box office gross soared to $285 million, a number seen by only two other movies in history at the time – E.T. and Star Wars. It launched a successful franchise and the subsequent careers of the rookie team involved in its creation.
