How Home Sweet Home Alone Changes the Original Movie’s Premise

How Home Sweet Home Alone Changes the Original Movie’s Premise

Home Sweet Home Alone, the latest film in the Home Alone franchise, changes the original movie’s premise and producer Dan Wilson explains how.

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How Home Sweet Home Alone Changes the Original Movie’s Premise

Home Sweet Home Alone, the latest film in the Home Alone franchise, changes the original movie’s premise and producer Dan Wilson explains how. Now streaming on Disney+, the reboot is again a tale of a young kid, Max (Archie Yates), defending his home from unwanted visitors by using wildly inventive tricks and traps. That’s where the similarities end, though, as Home Sweet Home Alone gives more of its attention to the burglars, Jeff (Rob Delaney) and Pam (Ellie Kemper), making them the film’s protagonists rather than Max.

In Home Sweet Home Alone, Jeff and Pam are a married couple at risk of losing their home. To keep it, they plan on selling an antique doll for hopefully a lot of money. When the doll comes up missing, they suspect a boy who recently visited them, Max, and break into his home while the family is Christmas vacationing in order to steal it back. Of course, Max has been left home alone and he uses an arsenal of traps against the “burglars” he believes mean to do him harm. Home Sweet Home Alone flips the original Home Alone’s premise by giving Jeff and Pam a sympathetic motivation, but it also avoids making Max out to be a total villain.

Back in early March 2020, Screen Rant was invited to visit the set of Home Sweet Home Alone and, along with other reporters, spoke with producer Dan Wilson. During the interview, we asked where the idea for this reboot of Home Alone came from. Wilson explained the idea to reboot Home Alone had originally been kicking around at Fox prior to the studio’s purchase by Disney, but it wasn’t until he suggested flipping the characters’ roles in the story that a concept began to take shape. Read Wilson’s full comments, below:

“In my years at Fox, we’ve looked at Home Alone a lot. And it’s always, you know, we naturally go through and look at old titles and things where we think, ‘Oh, this could do with a reboot or freshen up or something like that.’ Home Alone was always sacred, and it would get brought up in meetings, but it was one of those ones that was–we knew it was lightning in a bottle. It would get struck down immediately. And god, what was it? Probably, I don’t know, maybe about two years ago now. I’ll take credit for this, but I don’t know if I want to take credit. But this idea sort of stumbled out of my brain somehow, which was: Why don’t we just do Home Alone in the inverse. Right? And I don’t want to give away too much of how we’re doing the movie and what the plot is, and all that stuff. But it was about casting two really good comedic stars to do Home Alone in a different way. And that’s all I pitched. So I didn’t think anything would come of it.

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“Emma [Watts], who ran the studio at the time, she was like, ‘It sounds great.’ And she had us commission a script and I brought on Mikey Day and Streeter Seidell. And like, as most development goes, you just, you assume nothing’s going to happen. But with Mikey and Streeter, they really brought an amazing execution to that idea. Far beyond what I could have imagined when that came out of my mouth. So it’s been a gift, that script has been a gift for us. It captures the things we love about Home Alone. And that, you know, it’s still a family movie. It’s a holiday movie. It’s a comedy, you know, all those things you kind of want out of the Home Alone title you’ll get. It pays respect to the original, but it doesn’t try to duplicate it. And that’s the most important thing for us was not trying to recapture lightning in a bottle. That’s why Archie Yates is very different from Macaulay. The characters are all very different, very different type of story. So, so yeah, that’s kind of where the idea came from.”

Since the idea for Home Sweet Home Alone came from wanting to do the inverse of Home Alone, Wilson was also asked about how Jeff and Pam’s roles as burglars but not actual bad guys fits into the story. He explains:

“Well, you know, they’re our protagonists, and they’re sympathetic. And that was a balance that we had to strike between Max in the film, Archie, and Pam and Jeff. So not unlike the original film, that’s very clever in the way that it sets up this kid into a box where he’s unable to be helped. And not to say that we’re going to be, I hate to compare us to the original film, but we’ve worked very hard to put our characters in similar boxes that they can’t get out of, you know? Unless they do what they do, unless they break into this kid’s house.”

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It’s certainly an interesting idea to put the audience in the shoes of a desperate couple who feel they must break into someone’s house in order to escape their circumstances. To help establish Home Sweet Home Alone’s slightly different dynamic from the original, Max is also shown to be a bit a brat and made to be a little unlikable at the start. Still, Max isn’t really the film’s antagonist in the way the Wet Bandits are in Home Alone. Instead, the characters are actually working against their own misunderstandings of the situation, though that ultimately does lead to Jeff and Pam being pitted against Max and his painful array of traps.

Whether or not this approach will be a hit with family audiences who watch Home Sweet Home Alone over the holiday season remains to be seen. The reboot is presenting a familiar story in a new way, and while that doesn’t always win over fans, it at least helps to avoid accusations of the reboot simply redoing what’s been done before – something that can be said of other Home Alone movies that followed the original. For those interested in checking out whether or not the reboot is as a fun holiday caper as the original, Home Sweet Home Alone is now streaming on Disney+.

Link Source : https://screenrant.com/home-sweet-home-alone-movie-changes-original-how/

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