Home Alone director Chris Columbus is part of a truly solid crop of American directors who excelled in the comedy space in the 80s and 90s — but he isn’t quite as fond of the comedic efforts that came after his work in the Home Alone franchise. In fact, he recently went as far as to call the other installments “really bad.”
“It’s been revisited with really bad sequels,” Columbus said while speaking at a screening at the Academy Museum recently. “Sorry to insult anybody, but they’ve completely f***ed it up. It started with Home Alone 3 and then it just went downhill from there; Home Alone 3 is sort of the best of the bunch of the bad movies.”
He didn’t name drop any of the other titles specifically, but after Home Alone 3, there were three more sequels featuring different protagonists: 2002’s Home Alone 4, 2012’s Home Alone: The Holiday Heist, and 2021’s Home Sweet Home Alone. For Columbus, a big part of the problem was in the wirework, which gives a “false sense of the stunt” and makes the franchise’s classic stunts look unnatural.
