This Christmas Comedy Cost $18 Million But Stayed At No. 1 For 12 Straight Weekends

Home Alone was a small holiday comedy that its own studio almost dropped. After it opened in November 1990, it stayed at number one for 12 consecutive weekends and became one of the most profitable films of its time.

Nobody made a big fuss when it came out. Warner Bros. wanted a $1.2 million cut from the budget, but the producers said no, and the studio shut down production the very next day. It didn’t stay shut for long, though. Fox accepted John Hughes’s offer to finance the film, and the final budget came to $18 million.

Home Alone Box Office Success That Nobody Saw Coming

Now, the director wasn’t an obvious pick either. Chris Columbus has said he “desperately needed a job” after a flop. His last film, Heartbreak Hotel, came out in 1988, and he worried Hughes would never hire him again. However, two weeks later, the Home Alone script showed up, per Yahoo.

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The box office story started quietly with an opening of about $17 million in the US (per Box Office Mojo), the biggest pre-holiday fall opening on record. Then it didn’t drop off as most films do. It grew, and the next weekend it brought in above $20 million, the second-best Thanksgiving weekend ever.

Even the people who made it didn’t see this coming. Going in, they mostly hoped it wouldn’t flop. Columbus said the famous shaving lotion scream on the poster was a happy accident. “The script called for [Macaulay Culkin] to put shaving lotion on, and suddenly it burns his skin, and he screams. We didn’t know it was going to be the universal image for Home Alone,”  he said, per Entertainment Tonight.

Critics weren’t fans, and most of them dismissed it. But it didn’t matter, as people kept going to see it throughout the holidays and into the new year.

Home Alone Is Still A Christmas Tradition Today

The final numbers were huge. It made $285.7 million in the US and $191.6 million overseas. That made it the top-earning live-action comedy until The Hangover Part II came out in 2011, and it returned about 26 times its budget.

It also turned its young star into a household name, which nobody had planned. “Macaulay Culkin became a huge star, and that was unexpected,” Columbus said, according to SlashFilm.

More than 30 years later, people still watch it every December, and no sequel or reboot has come close to matching it. Columbus directed the first two films and has pushed back on bringing it back. “You can’t really recapture that,” he said, calling the original a very special moment. A comedy that nobody expected to last a quarter of a year ended up becoming a yearly tradition.

Home Alone Trailer

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