Home Alone 2

Macaulay Culkin Chimes in on Call to Remove Donald Trump From ‘Home Alone 2′

Home Alone 2 doesn’t get a lot of attention. Why filmmakers even bothered to try to best the Christmas classic that preceded it is beyond us. (Oh, yeah, cold hard box office cash.) But the subpar sequel has suddenly come into the limelight again. Why? Because fans of the franchise are calling for the removal of Donald Trump from a scene in The Plaza Hotel.

It wouldn’t be the first time Trump’s screen time was slashed. In December 2019, the Canadian Broadcasting Company aired a version of the film sans 45’s cameo. Trump and Don Jr. tried to rip them a new one over it on Twitter and Instagram, respectively (we won’t dignify the rants by posting the link to the latter), after which CBC released a statement saying the edit was only because the scene wasn’t “integral to the plot” and had been done prior to Trump becoming president. (Way to backpedal.)

One Twitter user had a novel solution to how the film could be tweaked.

“petition to digitally replace trump in ‘home alone 2’ with 40-year-old macaulay culkin,” she wrote.

Apparently, the former child star who played Kevin McCallister agrees. He responded, “Sold.”

Trump was never meant to be in the movie in the first place. But as director Chris Columbus explained to Insider last month: “Like most locations in New York City, you just pay a fee and you are allowed to shoot in that location. We approached The Plaza Hotel, which Trump owned at the time, because we wanted to shoot in the lobby. Trump said OK. We paid the fee, but he also said, ‘The only way you can use the Plaza is if I’m in the movie,'” he said. “So we agreed to put him in the movie, and when we screened it for the first time the oddest thing happened: People cheered when Trump showed up on-screen. So I said to my editor, ‘Leave him in the movie. It’s a moment for the audience.'”

Oh, it’s a moment all right. And the past four years have been full of moments “starring” Trump that we’d collectively like to forget. We can’t erase Trump from history (nor should we, lest America never learn its lesson), but Hollywood can certainly use its talented editors to fix this embarrassing flaw on what is otherwise a nostalgic piece of holiday filmmaking.

Cover Photo: Twentieth Century Fox

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