Home Alone Director Torches The Franchise's Sequels, Says They’ve Completely Ruined It
Home Alone director Chris Columbus blames Home Alone 3 for derailing the franchise and draining its holiday magic.
Chris Columbus, the guy who directed Home Alone and Home Alone 2, just put a pin in the exact moment he thinks the franchise slid downhill. And yeah, he names names.
Where he says it went wrong
Speaking at a screening at the Academy Museum (per THR), Columbus didn’t tiptoe around it. He blames the slide on what came after Macaulay Culkin’s Kevin era and thinks the decline starts with the first sequel that didn’t have him.
'It’s been revisited with really bad sequels. Sorry to insult anybody, but they’ve completely fucked it up. It started with Home Alone 3 and then it just went downhill from there; Home Alone 3 is sort of the best of the bunch of the bad movies.'
He didn’t explicitly rattle off titles beyond that, but it’s hard not to assume he’s also side-eyeing the later entries:
- Home Alone 4 (2002)
- Home Alone: The Holiday Heist (2012)
- Home Sweet Home Alone (2021)
His beef with the newer ones
Columbus says the slapstick stopped feeling real because of wirework. In his view, once the stunts started relying on rigs and floaty physics, the gags lost their crunch and gave what he calls a 'false sense of the stunt.' Translation: when you can feel the assist, the pain isn’t funny anymore.
What Macaulay Culkin would do instead
Separately, Culkin once pitched a legacy sequel that actually sounds like it could work: Kevin’s grown up, he’s overworked and not paying close enough attention, and his own kid locks him out and starts setting the traps. He shared the idea on his A Nostalgic Night with Macaulay Culkin tour (via Variety). Simple, mean, and kind of perfect.
Meanwhile, Culkin’s next gig
Culkin is set to show up in Fallout season 2 next. Different kind of booby traps, same energy.