Home Alone’s Christmas-y mood was created with a little blessing from the heavens

SUMMARY

Home Alone is hailed as one of the best Christmas films ever made, thanks to its visual ambience.
The crew had concerns about simulating snow for one of the most important scenes in the film.
However, a Christmas miracle graced them with the snow they needed for the shoot.

Home Alone is considered one of the best Christmas films of all time. The film, a brainchild of the late film producer John Hughes, was helmed by Chris Columbus. As they began filming on Valentine’s Day in 1990, the challenge in front of the Harry Potter director was to infuse the movie with a Christmas spirit. The crew faced this task head-on, and the film’s iconic ‘money shot’ came about in a miraculous way, almost as if the heavens provided a Christmas miracle.

Macaulay Culkin as Kevin McCallister in Home Alone
Home Alone boasted a talented cast including Joe Pesci, Daniel Stern, Catherine O’Hara, and Macaulay Culkin, who rose to fame as a child star. The film almost faced cancellation when Warner Bros. dropped the film after it surpassed its assigned budget of $10 million.

The Christmas Miracle That Gave Home Alone Its Money Shot

The snowfall scene in Home Alone

John Hughes faced budget constraints for Home Alone after Warner Bros. insisted on a $10 million budget. When the film crossed that mark early in production, WB shut down the production of the film. However, Hughes, having secretly met with 20th Century Fox, secured their support and resumed production. The budget constraints became a glaring matter when the film wanted to land its ‘money shot’ showing a snowy Christmas.

In the episode dedicated to Home Alone in the Netflix documentary The Movies That Made Us, the crew recounted their concerns about creating snow for the film with limited funds. They were filming the scenes in February in Chicago, and the crew recalled a warm climate with no natural snow on the ground. Although they planned to use fake snow made from potato flakes, one crucial scene couldn’t be faked.

The scene, where the mom comes home, required a perfect snowfall outside the McCallister home. They began worrying about the budget if they had to recreate the entire scene with fake snow. However, a true Christmas miracle unfolded as Chicago experienced heavy snowfall at that time.

Jackie Bucksbaum, the location manager on the film, shared the crew’s excitement in the documentary, noting, “Our beepers started going off, saying, ‘We’re moving to the McCallister house first thing in the morning. Make it happen.’” The production seized the opportunity to film the most important scene only on the second day of shooting, thanks to the unexpected snowfall. Bucksbaum added, “The money shot, that’s what it was.”

While the miracle elevated the film’s visual appeal, it also created certain challenges for the crew. The potato flakes used for fake snow began to rot as the natural snow melted, emitting an unpleasant odor on set.

The Majority Of The Home Alone Budget Went To Building The Set

A still from one of the best Christmas movies of all time, Home Alone

Jackie Bucksbaum scoured the streets of Chicago to locate the ideal setting for the McCallister house. However, when she found the perfect house featured in the movie, another problem popped up. The crew realized they couldn’t film inside the house due to insufficient space for all their equipment. The crew ultimately decided to build the interior set inside the gym of a school, where the crew had set up their offices in Chicago.

Executive producer Scott Rosenfelt revealed that the gym was big enough to build an entire house. Production designer John Muto and the team undertook the task of creating separate sets for each of the interior rooms. Rosenfelt shared in the documentary:
“We walked into this gym and we were like, it’s got a grid in the ceiling and it’s big enough and we could build a house in here. The next thing we knew, we built all the sets in the school.”
The final budget of the film stood at $18 million. Despite being initially dropped by Warner Bros., Home Alone turned out to be one of the studio’s biggest regrets as it grossed $476.7 million at the box office. The film became the second highest-grossing film of 1990, trailing only behind Ghost.