Does the Original 'Home Alone' Director Not Know the Movie Was Remade?

A key feature of lockdown was trying to retain any semblance of normalcy from the before times. There was no going out and talking directly into people’s mouths like we all wanted. You couldn’t sit directly next to strangers at a restaurant and hear them loudly discuss their marital issues. Even going to the movies proved challenging, unless you were going to see Spider-Man: No Way Home, a movie for which people ignored another surge in a deadly virus that was actively killing people. But what if the movies were brought to you?!

Plenty of media companies attempted to position themselves as having the go-to streaming app while folks were stuck at home with little else to do. Part of that included premiering movies originally meant for the big screen on everyone’s (relatively) tiny TVs. It was pretty exciting! Since my wife and I were new parents, we got to see things we may not have gotten the chance to under normal circumstances. Watching the first Dune together, on our TV, while our six-month-olds slept in the next room, was a real highlight.

What’s the opposite of a highlight? A low point? I’d say a nadir, but that seems harsh given that people were actually dying, and all my wife and I had to do was watch a really terrible movie that we were actually kind of excited about. That was the case with Home Sweet Home Alone. The sequel/reboot/remake/who the f*** knows of the 1990 holiday classic was beyond a slog to get through. It felt like it was actively torturing us. It’s not just that the movie felt like a photocopy of a worn-out VHS of the original; it had some good ideas that it did not stick to.

The setup of the film actually felt like a fun deviation from the original. It seemed to ask the question: what if the kid is the bad guy? The movie stars Archie Yates, whom I (and many others) loved in Jojo Rabbit, and makes him the most obnoxious character possible. Meanwhile, the folks robbing his house, played by Ellie Kemper and Rob Delaney, are made to be sympathetic. Then all of that gets tossed aside for a run-of-the-mill knockoff that seemed endless. It was a bad idea, and Chris Columbus, director of the original, never wants to see that happen … even if it already did.

The director and, to my great surprise, Nosferatu producer(!!), recently told Entertainment Weekly that a reboot of the 1990 film would not be a good idea. “I think Home Alone really exists as, not at this timepiece, but it was this very special moment, and you can’t really recapture that. I think it’s a mistake to try to go back and recapture something we did 35 years ago,” Columbus explained. “I think it should be left alone.” I had to double-check because it would make sense if Columbus was an Executive Producer on Home Sweet Home Alone, even if in name only, but he wasn’t! That begs the question: Does he not know it exists?

There were plenty of awful, straight-to-DVD sequels to Home Alone. But the new one does seem to fit in the reboot category. It features a returning cast member (a very weird scene with Devin Ratray, who played Buzz in the original two films) and a retread of the original plot with some slight changes. If anything, sticking to the main kid being a little sh*t who is eventually defeated by two adults trying to have a baby (or whatever it was) would have at least been different. However, it’s more likely that Columbus is just correct, and this never should have been done. Maybe we can send his interview back in time or something and see if anything changes. If this article starts to fade away as you’re reading it, you know we succeeded.