1/ Mollie had never seen it, so last night we sat down to watch Home Alone. I had seen it many times, but as we were watching it something weird dawned on me: Die Hard and Home Alone are basically the same movie and may even be part of an extended universe.
2/ Hear me out! (Perhaps I am not the first to notice this?) I mean, obviously the plots are different in a lot of ways, but there are some key similarities – they’re both Christmas movies about holding your familily together. In both, the bad guys are introduced as...
3/ ...being good to misdirect the audience, and if you want to get disturbingly Freudian about it, there’s a lot of similarities between Bonnie Bedelia and Catherine O’Hara’s characters, right down to the red hair. But the larger point is that if you’re old enough to...
4/ ...remember when Die Hard came out, it wasn’t just a big blockbuster. It was hugely influential in Hollywood, where everyone was trying to ape the movie’s basic formula of a lone hero fighting off a team of bad guys in a confined space by setting traps and staying...
5/ ...one step ahead of them. There were a lot of knock offs in the next decade after Die Hard, e.g. Steven Seagal’s Under Siege, Van Damme’s Sudden Death, etc. It got so bad, I remember someone joking in the early 90s – was it Christopher Buckley in the Thank You...
6/ ...For Smoking book? – about a screenwriter pitching “Die Hard in a hot-air balloon.” No recall that Home Alone came out only two years after Die Hard, so it seems kind of obvious to me that someone got John Hughes in a room and said, “Die Hard, but for kids.
7/ ” After they got done laughing about it, Hughes realized he could make it work. Finally, I swear to you, I just Googled her ALREADY IN THE PROCESS OF WRITING THIS and discovered Bonnie Bedelia is Macaulay Culkin’s aunt?!!!! So let’s just imagine for the hell of it...
8/ ...that the Catherine O’Hara and Bonnie Bedelia’s red hair isn’t a total coincidence – let’s say, that the maiden name of Catherine O’Hara’s character in Home Alone (the family is never given a last name in the film) is “Gennaro,” which would make Holly Gennaro...
9/ ...McLane and Kevin’s mom sisters. Ergo, Kevin from Home Alone is John McLane’s nephew in the extended Die Hard Home Alone universe. BOOM. Merry Christmas to all and to all a good night.
