It’s almost three decades since the family comedy film Home Alone was released. There are some interesting facts about the film that were never known, but the 2019 Netflix documentary spilled some about this Christmas flick.
Netflix’s The Movies That Made Us is a four-part series that explores some of Hollywood’s most iconic films through interviews with the directors and industry insiders, and Home Alone was one of those films.
One intriguing fact about it was a secret “illegal backdoor deal” that was made to revive the production of Home Alone. It was after the studio initially halted the film due to a financial dispute involving $1 million.
Why Did Warner Bros. Shut Down the Production for Home Alone?
Initially, the writer and producer of Home Alone, John Wilden Hughes Jr., told Warner Bros. he could make the film just for $10 million. But its expenses escalated to $14.7 million. The producer thought it wouldn’t be much of a problem, but it was. As the narrator told in The Movies That Made Us:
“The set was growing by the day, and Warner Brothers’ little kids-sized budget of about ten million dollars was growing, too. But this wasn’t what Warner Brothers and Bob Daly had agreed to.”
John Heller, the former president of Hughes Entertainment, recalled, “Unless we could deliver a $13.5 million budget the next day, they [Warner Bros] were gonna pull the plug. The decision was we’ll push back. We’ll write a really good memo showing there’s nothing left to cut.”
But it didn’t work out because Warner Bros. didn’t agree to settle for just $1 million. As a result, Warner Bros. had to shut down the production. Anyways, a backdoor deal saved Home Alone.
A Secret Deal Revived Home Alone After Studio Shut its Production
Weeks later, Hughes secretly met with a rival studio, 20th Century Fox. He ensured that they received a copy of the Home Alone script in case Warner Bros backed out.
The executive producer Scott Rosenfelt admitted in The Movies That Made Us, “Legally, another studio isn’t meant to see a piece of material until it’s legally in turnaround, and that didn’t exactly happen.” So, “a screenplay was left somewhere so someone could pick it up. It was clandestinely delivered.”
Fox loved the screenplay and agreed to support the film if Warner Bros. had any issues, they’d even cover the bloated budget to make this feature film. Rosenfelt said in the docu-series that WB called them to “stop working.” And he immediately called the Fox execs and said, “‘We go the call.’ They said, ‘You’re now a Fox picture. Everything is fine, keep going.'”
The risk taken by the film executives were eventually paid off. Home Alone became a massive success, earning over $476 million globally.
