Home Alone (1990) on Netflix
The McCallister family flies to Paris for Christmas and leaves eight-year-old Kevin behind. He has the house to himself until two burglars, Harry and Marv, target it.
- Netflix3.6/5
- IMDb7.8/10754,985 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes67%
Trailer
Plot summary
Kevin McCallister is the youngest of the McCallister family, and his older siblings and cousins tease him as the family gathers near Chicago for a Christmas trip to Paris. After a fight with his brother Buzz ruins dinner, Kate sends Kevin to the attic. Heavy winds cut the power that night and the alarm clocks reset, so nobody wakes on time, and in the morning rush to the airport the family leaves without him. Kevin wakes to an empty house and enjoys the freedom: he eats what he wants, watches violent movies, and rummages through Buzz's room. Two burglars, Harry and Marv, have been robbing vacant houses in the neighborhood, and the McCallister home is next.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Home Alone (1990)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- John Hughes thought of Home Alone while writing a list of things not to forget before a holiday. He added his children to the list, then wondered what a ten-year-old boy left behind would do, and eight pages of notes became the screenplay.
- Warner Bros. shut the production down when the budget reached $14.7 million and the producers refused to cut $1.2 million. Filming resumed almost at once because 20th Century Fox, which Hughes had approached in advance, took over; the final budget was $18 million.
- Daniel Stern was cast as Marv, quit when the schedule stretched from six weeks to eight with no extra pay, and was replaced by Daniel Roebuck, who lasted two days of rehearsal before Chris Columbus decided he lacked chemistry with Joe Pesci and brought Stern back.
- John Candy was free for a single day and shot his scenes in a 23-hour stretch for a fee of $414, doing the film as a favour to John Hughes. In return he was the only actor allowed off-script, and Chris Columbus says all of his dialogue was improvised.
- Joe Pesci resented the early calls because they cost him his morning nine holes of golf, and after he took the assistant director by the collar the daily start moved from 7 a.m. to 9 a.m. That squeezed night filming, since child labor law sent Macaulay Culkin home by 10 p.m.
- The booby-trap stunts were first rigged with safety harnesses, but the harnesses showed on camera, so Troy Brown and Leon Delaney doubled Pesci and Stern without them. Culkin still carries a scar from a rehearsal of the scene in which Harry tries to bite off his finger.
- Bruce Broughton was to write the score and was even named on early posters, but canceled at the last minute for The Rescuers Down Under. Chris Columbus joked about asking John Williams instead, then took the idea seriously and reached Williams through Steven Spielberg.
- Home Alone is a Christmas Eve fixture in Poland, where Polsat screens it every year. When the channel left it out of its 2010 plan, more than 90,000 people protested on Facebook and Polsat reversed the decision; 4.44 million Poles watched it in 2016.
