Apparently, no one asked Chris Columbus because they actually made a Home Alone reboot four years ago. Home Sweet Home Alone starred Jo Jo Rabbit‘s Archie Yates as a rich kid who stole a doll at an open house and then tortures the poor couple who try to obtain it back from him. In her C review of the straight-to-streaming Disney+ movie, The A.V. Club‘s Katie Rife called it “one of those 21st-century sequels that cares more about inserting Easter eggs for the original film than it does providing similar entertainment value.”
Columbus himself directed the beloved first film and its sequel (which featured that infamous Trump cameo), while Raja Gosnell helmed the third film; all of those were penned by John Hughes. Since then, there were two more straight-to-TV Home Alones before Home Sweet Home Alone, which was directed by Dan Mazer (Dirty Grandpa) and written by Saturday Night Live‘s Mikey Day and Streeter Sidell.
Much like his feelings on Home Alone, Columbus has similarly said it would be “impossible” to do another Mrs. Doubtfire without Robin Williams (the star of the Broadway show was “supposedly very energetic and phenomenal. But he’s no Robin. Robin was one-of-a-kind,” he told SF Gate in 2021). “In this version of Hollywood that we live in, everybody is remaking everything, and rebooting everything. I mean, there’s a Home Alone reboot coming out. What’s the point?” Columbus said shortly before the premiere of Home Sweet Home Alone (via CinemaBlend). “The movie exists, let’s just live with the movie that existed. There’s no point in us remaking The Wizard of Oz, there’s no point in any of us remaking the classic films. Make something original, because we need more original material. So, no. No point.”
That said, he’s not against all reboots. The director of the first two Harry Potter films thinks the upcoming television reboot is a “spectacular idea, because there’s a certain restriction when you’re making a film,” he told People. “The fact that they have the leisure of [multiple] episodes for each book, I think that’s fantastic. You can get all the stuff in the series that we didn’t have an opportunity to do … all these great scenes that we just couldn’t put in the films.”
