Home Sweet Home Alone

The abiding premise of Home Alone — a precocious tot in suburban Chicago defending his home against bumbling burglars with an array of increasingly complicated booby traps — feels like the kind of lightning-in-a-bottle pitch that could only sustain itself for one perfect movie. And yet, like its fellow Christmas-siege classic Die Hard, that hasn’t stopped studio execs from mining the concept for, count ’em, four sequels and counting. (A fifth, Home Sweet Home Alone, is set to premiere on Disney+ on November 12th.) After the success of the 1990 original, written by John Hughes and directed by Chris Columbus — a film that grossed nearly $500 million at the box office and catapulted Macaulay Culkin to superstardom — a sequel naturally followed, Home Alone 2: Lost in New York. Expand...