The “Home Alone” battle between 8-year-old Kevin McCallister (Macaulay Culkin) and two thieves known as the Wet Bandits has graced screens around the world every Christmas since the film was released in 1990.
And every year, for some viewers, the McCallisters’ grand home and lifestyle inspires its own tradition: wondering how rich this family is.
The New York Times turned to economists and people involved in the film to find the answer.
The McCallisters are the 1 Percent.
Early in the film, one of the thieves, Harry (Joe Pesci), tells his fellow Wet Bandit, Marv (Daniel Stern), that the McCallister home is their prime target in an affluent neighborhood.
“That’s one, Marv, that’s the silver tuna,” Harry said, before speculating that the house contained many “top-flight goods,” including VCRs, stereos, fine jewelry and “strange marketable securities .”
The home is the best indicator of how much money the McCallisters have.
The silver tuna, or its exterior, is a real-world, house at 671 Lincoln Avenue in the Chicago suburb of Winnetka, one of the most expensive neighborhoods in the United States, according to Realtor.com. There appears to be enough space for Kevin and his four siblings to each have their own bedrooms, but can also accommodate an army of guests.
In 1990, housing was affordable only for the top 1 percent of household incomes in Chicago, and that’s still the case today, according to economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago.
The economists – Max Gillet, a senior research analyst; Cindy Hull, an assistant vice president and interim head of the financial markets group; and Thomas Walstrum, a senior business economist — made this determination after looking at data including household incomes in the Chicago metropolitan statistical area for 1990 and 2022, home property values, prevailing rates of the mortgage at the time, and typical taxes and insurance.
Working on the assumption that the McCallisters did not spend more than 30 percent of their income on housing, the economists also determined that the house would be affordable to a household with an income of $305,000 in 1990 (about $665,000 in 2022).
By mid-2022, a similar home would cost about $2.4 million, based on Zillow estimates for “Home Alone” houses. A home of that value would be affordable to a household with an income of $730,000, which is in the top 1 percent of households in the Chicago area, economists said.
How are they rich?
“Home Alone” never explains what the parents do for work.
On the internet, where this question appears regularly, some people suggested that Kate McCallister was a fashion designer, because the house had several mannequins inside, which were later featured in one of the attempts of Kevin to deceive the thieves into thinking that he is not, in fact, alone at home.
Todd Strasser, who wrote the official novelizations of “Home Alone” and two of its sequels, said in an interview that he was not strictly supervised by the filmmakers. The guideline, he said, was essentially: “Here’s the script, do whatever you want.”
So in the book, he made Kevin’s mother a fashion designer, because of the mannequins, and Kevin’s father a businessman, because it was “a safe bet,” he said.
He said it never occurred to him to explain in detail how the McCallisters came by their money; He thought they were “upper middle class” but not “super rich.”
The family has other attributes of significant-but-not-stratospheric wealth: They wear nice clothes and rent multiple vans to take them to the airport, yes, but when Kate tries to bribe an elderly couple to hand over their tickets from Paris so he can return home, he offers jewelry and money, but hints that his Rolex may be fake.
“I don’t know how much the McCallisters made, but it sure put a lot into my bank account,” Strasser said.
A fan theory posits that Peter McCallister is involved in organized crime. Under this theory, the McCallister home was specifically targeted as a form of revenge, and Kevin’s brutal violence against the burglars was the product of an upbringing exposed to criminal activity.
The Times cannot dispel this theory.
Uncle Rob paid for the flights.
A commonly cited data point on family wealth is their Christmas trip to Paris.
Flying 15 people to Paris is expensive, especially with four adults flying first class, but Kevin’s parents don’t pay for plane tickets. Early in the movieKate McCallister tells a police officer — who is actually Harry in disguise — that her husband’s brother paid for the flights.
That brother was Uncle Rob. He is a minor figure in the first film, but the few mentions he gets indicate that he is loaded. He pays for the tickets, and he has an apartment in Paris with a clear view of the Eiffel Tower and somehow can house 15 members of his family. (The film’s sequel, “Home Alone 2: Lost in New York,” further suggests that Uncle Rob is wealthy, but this review is based only on the first film.)
The third brother, Uncle Frank (the mean one), lives in Ohio and travels with the family from Illinois to Paris. We don’t learn anything about his income, but we know he’s cheap. At his brother’s house in Illinois, he avoids paying a $122.50 pizza bill. On the plane, eating in first class, she tells her husband to put the crystal glass in her purse.
This behavior may indicate that he is rich. Shoplifting is “more common” among people with family incomes above $70,000, according to a 2008 article published in the American Journal of Psychiatry.
Uncle Frank is also a typical adult character in the world of John Hughes, who wrote and produced “Home Alone,” said Robert Bullmana professor of sociology at Saint Mary’s College of California who studies the representation of youth and high school in film.
He says that a common mark of a Hughes film is the dramatic tension created by the conflict between the young and the old, which is almost always resolved in favor of the younger person.
He noted that in Hughes’ teen films — including “The Breakfast Club,” and “Pretty in Pink” — class tensions are also often prominent and drive the story forward.
“His stories often favor the perspective of the working-class child or the poor child trying to gain access to a more affluent peer group, for example,” Professor Bulman said. “But in ‘Home Alone,’ it’s definitely a triumph for Kevin as a kid, but also Kevin as a rich kid defending his awesome castle.”
The film is not about money.
Eve Cauley, the set decorator for “Home Alone,” was responsible for decor such as furniture and wallpaper inside the McCallister home, which was shot on sets built at a local high school.
He said in an email that the house is not expensively furnished but simply has a “classy, upscale look.”
When the movie was made, navy blue and dusty pink were popular interior design colors, Cauley said. But he was inspired by Norman Rockwell paintings and vintage Christmas cards that used saturated reds, greens and golds in the family home.
Hughes told her she wanted the house to have a “timeless look,” she said. “He told me that he likes his films to look more beautiful and cleaner than the reality, because his goal in making films is to entertain the audience and uplift them,” he said.
Cauley also has advice for people looking for answers about family income.
“For me, with respect, fans who argue about parents’ income, or household expenses, should, instead, enjoy the film,” he said.
“After all, John Hughes and director Christopher Columbus created this heartwarming and comic film as entertainment for audiences, to lift the spirits for the holidays. It did, and still does, stimulate.”
