Ellie Kemper and Rob Delaney to leave Jojo Rabbit's Archie Yates Home Alone in new reboot
Aux Features Film
Back in August, we learned that Disney—having just purchased Fox’s film assets—was planning to put together reboots of various Fox properties for the Disney+ streaming service. We didn’t know what that specifically meant, but we did know that it involved Home Alone, Night At The Museum, Diary Of Wimpy Kid, and Cheaper By The Dozen. Now, because everyone loves watching reboots and remakes and revivals of old things they used to like (even when they say they don’t), Disney is apparently moving forward with a Home Alone reboot that will star JoJo Rabbit’s Archie Yates as some new kid (not Kevin McCallister) who gets left behind and his to defend his home from bumbling burglars.
This comes from Variety, which says Yates will be joined by Ellie Kemper and Rob Delaney, who will be playing the poor kid’s parents (and not the bumbling burglars, dashing our hopes of seeing Ellie Kemper do her best Joe Pesci impression). What we will get to see, if the old movies are any indication, is Kemper looking calmly saying something like “We probably didn’t forget anything at home when left for vacation, what would we have forgotten?” as Rob Delaney contentedly closes his eyes to take an airplane nap, and then Kemper will jolt forward, stare straight into the camera, and shout… whatever the new kid’s name will be.
We don’t know when the movie will premiere (next holidays at the earliest seems like a safe bet), but it will be directed by Dan Mazer.
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This comes from , which says Yates will be joined by Ellie Kemper and Rob Delaney, who will be playing the poor kid’s parents (and not the bumbling burglars, dashing our hopes of seeing Ellie Kemper do her best Joe Pesci impression).
From the linked article (though I guess they could have updated it since this posted):
Though originally thought to be Yates’ parents, sources now say Kemper and Delaney will be playing someone else in the film, possibly another couple not related to Yates.Also read somewhere else that they’re just calling it the “Home Alone” project right now because it’s similar in concept but not meant to be an actual reboot or anything. We’ll see. The cast rocks but will they be able to craft a good reason for a kid to be left home alone and unreachable in the modern era of cell phones, email, nest/ring cameras and other smart devices?
I know the exact solution….his parents are ardent readers of Gizmodo, so they’re terrified of technology spying on them and have no smart devices at all.
My money is on her playing John Candy’s traveling polka player. Really big in Sheboygan.
Yeah, Home Alone is one of those films that just isn’t possible nowadays due to how connected everyone is. You need a supremely good excuse.
Plus now it would end with the kid going to a foster home because the parents forgot him.
I was thinking the same thing. Look at Home Alone 2 – nowadays he’d probably just give the hotel his dad’s cell number, they’d call him, and he’d set up the room for Kevin until they could fly up and get him.
He wouldn’t even need Trump to help this time.
Don’t know if they could do it, but it is doable:Kevin II, is too young for a cell phone (a plot point and argument the parents have early on to establish the 10 year old doesn’t have a phone).
You could stretch things a bit and still have the kid cut off from communication early on. All the family but him have cell phones so they canceled the land-line. The power outage that killed the phones in the original blows the router/modem this time and/or they take all the tablets/laptops with them or Kevin II has to figure out the password/get around the parental lock-outs.
Could even leave behind a cell phone as someone got a new phone for the trip (and then everyone got new sim cards that work in France to avoid the fees) and leave behind their old sim cards too. So it takes a bit before Kevin II gets the phone unlocked and a working sim card installed. That might be too much though and just leaving him a tablet he has to unlock would be better/easier.
If the router or internet junction are out, all the connected devices won’t work so the fancy smart tech and security stuff is useless. Go a step further and instead of the pretending to be a cop, the robbers pretend to be (or actually are) cable repair and disable the phone/internet junction for the neighborhood (thus by passing all the smart devices and such). It could even be their initial disabling of the junction that sparks the power/internet outage causing people to sleep in as their phones are all dead by morning. As they rob each house they steal/break the local security unit to kill the local video files . Maybe one of them sticks the unit in the sink/tub to short it out and leaves the water running at every house like in the original, only now it was as much a CYA move as a calling card.
The parents may be too afraid to call the police for fear CPS will take him away or the cops will shoot him or just keep them as incompetent police.
All this explaining why he can’t get in touch with his parents doesn’t sound like it leaves much room for braining people with irons or stapling their faces to doors.
Why does Home Alone need a remake? Why does anything?
Any movie featuring Roberts Blossom should not be remade, rebooted or reanythinged, except rewatched. Because there will never be a man like Roberts Blossom again.
If you want to get existential about it, no movie really NEEDS to be made.
Kid Die Hard can not be stopped.
Home Alone has already been remade, pretty much. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Home_Alone:_The_Holiday_HeistThis one’s just higher-profile.
It didn’t need one and it still doesn’t.
This is the sixth Home Alone movie. It’s a little late to get precious about it.
But…like…Catherine O’Hara has, what, 5 minutes of screen time in the original? Rather Kemper be one of the bandits. Otherwise it’s a glorified cameo.
She’s on there a lot more than you remember; I’d estimate her screentime to be at least 15 minutes. Understandably, Hughes wanted to drive home that she wasn’t a horrible mother.
Of course, she would make this mistake again….
Caulkin should star as a twisted, grown up Kevin who kidnaps neglectful parents and places them in elaborate death-traps. The new kid has to venture in and save his parents.
I think there’s a YouTube video of a messed up, grown up Kevin that he plays. Unless I imagined the whole thing. But not like you said.
https://digg.com/video/macaulay-culkin-dryvrs-home-alone
Saw: Alone?
Lets just have his brother do it, as his character from Succession, guarding the mansion.
Die Hard and Home Alone are both owned by Disney now (they were both 20th Century Fox properties). They could totally do a movie where John McClane ends up on a train with a grown-up Kevin McAllister and his family, and then they have to fight off bad guys taking over the train . . . except that since it would be R-Rated, they could actually make all of Kevin’s booby traps bone-crunchingly nasty.
Or remake the original movies, only with Kevin and John in each other’s movies
“Yippi-kay-ay, ya filthy animals.”
But this is an actual remake not a reboot? I know people have been using the two interchangeably but there is a difference, unless this one somehow actually does involve the original characters?