A backdoor deal saved one of the holiday season’s biggest and most well-loved Christmas films of all time, with Warner Bros. biggest regret having turned down Home Alone.
Holiday films weren’t a rare find back in the 1990s, but studios were slightly more hesitant about whether or not they would succeed. Not many fans know that Home Alone, led by Macaulay Culkin, was originally under Warner Bros. until they pulled the plug due to a budget issue.
John Hughes, the writer and producer behind classics like Sixteen Candles and The Breakfast Club, was suddenly struck with an idea while preparing to take a holiday. A must-have checklist led to the comical idea of what would happen if he forgot his children.
“I was going away on vacation, and making a list of everything I didn’t want to forget. I thought, ‘Well, I’d better not forget my kids.’ Then I thought, ‘What if I left my 10-year-old son at home? What would he do?'” Hughes explained to Time magazine.
Hughes ended up developing eight pages of notes that became the screenplay for Home Alone, and he initially went to Warner Bros. to finance and distribute it. They were on board with producing the holiday film because Hughes promised he could make it for a budget of less than $10 million.
Creating a film for less than $70 million was rarely seen in the 1990s, but as production started with Christopher Columbus as director, Home Alone went over budget.
John Hughes secretly met with 20th Century Fox for ‘Home Alone’
The original $10 million budget suddenly went up to $14.7 million, with Hughes and everyone behind its production sure they could convince the studio to still back the film.
“Unless we could deliver a $13.5 million budget the next day, they (Warner Bros) were gonna pull the plug,” said former president of Hughes Entertainment, John Heller, according to News.com.au.
“The decision was, we’ll push back. We’ll write a really good memo showing there’s nothing left to cut.”
Their plans ultimately failed as Warner Bros. pulled the plug on Home Alone and shut down production the next day. According to Rolling Stone, their decision was also due to watching The Bonfire of the Vanities become a box-office flop around the same time and grossing less than half of its $47 million budget.
In a surprise twist, Hughes planned for the possibility of Warner Bros. rejecting the new budget for Home Alone. He met with rival studio 20th Century Fox weeks earlier in secret to see if they would fund the film.
Executive producer Scott Rosenfelt once commented that the script had magically appeared at Fox and bypassed all legal restrictions that would have forced the studio to not see it due to it still being under Warner Bros.
“Legally another studio isn’t meant to see a piece of material until it’s legally in turnaround, and that didn’t exactly happen,” executive producer Scott Rosenfelt said. “Basically a screenplay was left somewhere so someone could pick it up. It was clandestinely delivered.”
When Warner Bros. axed Home Alone, Rosenfelt immediately called Fox to tell them they got the call. Fox, in response, told them, “You’re now a Fox picture. Everything is fine, keep going.”
Home Alone went on to become the second biggest blockbuster of 1990 and grossed over $476 million at the box office on a $14 million budget. It was nominated for two Oscars and two Golden Globes. Culkin became a household name in the industry, as the film is considered one of the best Christmas movies of all time and was preserved in the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress.
Related: In 1973, Tippi Hedren and her husband funded one of Hollywood’s ‘most dangerous’ films with real lions, and led their daughter Melanie Griffith to get mauled and need plastic surgery
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