Home Alone 5 set for Christmas release

Just because Macaulay Culkin is all grown up, don’t think the ‘Home Alone’ franchise is dead in the water.

‘Home Alone 5’ has just been announced, but it won’t be in cinemas. Instead it’s a TV movie made by ABC Family for their Christmas schedule, so we’re not sure if it will even be shown in the UK. Weirdly, it stars Malcolm McDowell (Alex from ‘A Clockwork Orange’) alongside Edward Asner (‘Up’, ‘Elf’), Eddie Steeples, and Demi Mazar.

[Related story: Macaulay Culkin looking gaunt]
[Related feature: What happened to Macaulay Culkin's film career?]
[Related feature: Most pointless movie remake named]

It’s a totally new story, with Christian Martyn - best known for 2010’s ‘Snowmen’ (yeh...us neither) - playing an unrelated destructive kid called Finn.

Peter Hewitt (‘Garfield’) is in the director’s chair for this one, which sees Finn upset to learn his family is moving from California to the “scariest house he’s ever seen” in Maine. Believing it’s haunted, he sets traps to find the ghost - but comes face to face with thieves McDowell, Steeples and Mazar.

Some readers may be surprised to hear that the ‘Home Alone’ franchise is still going at all, with the last two films under the radar for many.

The original early 90s movies ‘Home Alone’ and ‘Home Alone 2: Lost in New York’ - which starred a healthier looking Macaulay Culkin as Kevin McCallister - were a huge success, raking in £570 million between them.  But when Culkin grew too old to play the cuddly sadist, many assumed that would that for the series.

However, studio Fox kept it going, and rebooted the franchise in 1997 with a completely new cast.

Alex D. Linz took the role of Alex Pruitt, another totally different meddlesome kid who gets entangled with a North Korean terrorist organization after mistakenly taking a remote control car containing their top secret microchip. Really.

The film didn’t do great at the box office, making a rather average £50 million. It did see a young Scarlett Johansson show up as Pruitt’s older sister though.

By the time ‘Home Alone 4’ came along in 2002, it was a straight-to-TV affair. Bizarrely it saw Kevin McCallister back, but he was now played by Mike Weinberg, rather than Culkin.

Depressingly, Kevin’s parents (both also played by new actors), had now split up and he was spending Christmas with his dad and his rich new girlfriend at her giant mansion. The first film’s bumbling crook, Marv (played by French Stewart this time) also returned with new accomplice ‘Vera’ and once again they try to break into the house.

Daniel Stern, who played Marv in the first two films, reportedly turned down the role, calling it “utter garbage”.

Fans also panned it for low production values and for messing with the chronology of the beloved originals. Perhaps this is why it took so long for ‘Part 5’ to come around.

Did you even know the franchise was still going? Do you think they should keep on making new instalments? Let us know in the comments section below.