James R | On 08, Aug 2019

Home Alone and a number of other Fox films are being lined up for remakes a Disney+.

The upcoming streaming service is an increasingly large focus for the House of Mouse, as it looks to take on the dominance of Netflix and capitalise on its own brands. Part of that is also leveraging the wealth of intellectual property now available to Disney after its merger with Fox. And so, while High School Musical and Monsters Inc. are already underway in new guises and spin-offs, and a host of Marvel series are also planned, the studio’s chief Bob Iger has now confirmed that four Fox films are also being targeted: Night At the Museum, Diary of a Wimpy Kid, Cheaper By the Dozen and, most notably of all, Home Alone.

The franchise, which began in 1990 with the tale of young Kevin McCallister (Macaulay Culkin), who is accidentally left on his own when his family go on holiday at Christmas, has spawned multiple sequels, with the series continuing to a fifth entry, even after Culkin existed following Home Alone 2.

“So far this year we’ve released five of the top six movies,” Iger told a conference call with investors this week. “Including four which have generated more than a billion dollars in global box office.”

But, he added, Fox has underperformed, leading Disney to axe the majority of Fox’s existing development slate and refocusing it with Marvel head Kevin Feige taken on the superhero titles and Disney+ looking to “leverage Fox’s vast library of great titles to further enrich [its] content mix”.

Whether that will mean Home Alone is reimagined as a series or a film isn’t clear, but Disney has said that it wants the remake to have the “same standards and the same creative discipline” as the original.

The news has prompted horrified reactions from Home Alone fans online, with Macauley Culkin joining in the reactions by posting a photo of himself on Twitter lounging on a sofa in pyjamas with his phone. “This is what an updated Home Alone would actually look like,” he tweeted.

Hey @Disney, call me!

— Macaulay Culkin (@IncredibleCulk) August 7, 2019

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