Disney Plans To Reboot ‘Home Alone’ & Other Classic Fox Properties

Disney clearly has no reservations revisiting older properties in its back catalog; this year alone, the multimedia conglomerate released live-action remakes of Aladdin, The Lion King and Dumbo, all to less-than-stellar results. However, the newest remake Disney is contemplating is an even more surprising choice: Home Alone. Notably, Home Alone is among the many properties that entered Disney’s custody upon its acquisition of 20th Century Fox.

Disney CEO Bob Iger confirmed a Home Alone reboot is planned during an earnings call on Tuesday. “We’re also focused on leveraging Fox’s vast library of great titles to further enrich the content mix on our [direct-to-consumer] platforms,” Iger confirmed. Cheaper by the Dozen, Night at the Museum and Diary of a Wimpy Kid are among those other IPs Disney plans to reboot. It’s currently unknown whether these remakes will become feature-length films or serialized programs for the company’s television networks or forthcoming Disney+ streaming service, which is scheduled to arrive this November.

Several people on social media have been critical of the decision to remake Home Alone. Some have decried it for needlessly aping on a nostalgic classic while others have questioned how the film’s premise – that a child was left behind at home during a family vacation – would translate into an era where most people have smartphones.

Home Alone was released in 1990 and starred a young Macaulay Culkin as Kevin McCallister. It was directly followed by Home Alone 2: Lost in New York two years later, which brought back the original cast and continued Kevin’s story. There have been three sequels since; one of them brought back the Kevin character (with a new actor) while the others starred new protagonists, but none of them captured the success of the first two films.