One particularly entertaining example of audiences intentionally overthinking a movie, is the periodic “wait…how much money does Kevin McCallister’s family have?” revelation that pops up on social media when audiences are rewatching Home Alone. The massive house they live in, combined with the seemingly limitless disposable income on display with their luxury vacations and no-limit credit cards, certainly raises some interesting questions if you’re the kind of person who really wants to interrogate the verisimilitude of a children’s movie. But you know who does, apparently, want to do that? The Federal Reserve, who had a little fun this idea.
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The New York Times reached out to some economics with the Federal Reserve and asked them to think on it. They went with the assumption that the McCallisters would have spent around 30% of their total annual income on housing — and that would have put them in the top 1% of earners in the Chicago area, likely earning a minimum of $305,000 per year. Adjusted for inflation, that would be $665,000 now.
Of course, the housing market is an unrelenting hellscape, so these days you would have to earn at least $730,000 per year in order to afford it. The house now is estimated at around $2.4 million on Zillow.
The paper also reached out to Todd Strasser, who wrote the official novelization of Home Alone. That’s as close as you’re going to get to a writer at this point, since John Hughes, who wrote the film, has passed away. According to Strasser, he didn’t put too much thought into it, characterizing them as reasonably well-to-do, but not obscenely wealthy. In the movie, there’s no mention of Kevin’s parents’ jobs. in the novelization, Strasser said that Kevin’s mom Kate was a fashion designer, which explains the mannequins kicking around the house. His father Peter is characterized generically as a “businessman.”
At least in the first movie, Kevin’s parents seem like they could be playing at being richer than they are; as the Times points out, Kate has a Rolex that is implied to be counterfeit (but convincing!), and the 15 tickets to Paris were paid for by Peter’s brother, who is openly characterized as being wealthy.
“[John Hughes’s] stories usually favor the perspective of the working class kid or the poor kid who is trying to gain access to a wealthier peer group, for instance,” Robert Bulman, a sociology professor at Saint Mary’s College of California, told the Times. “But in ‘Home Alone,’ it’s unmistakably a victory for Kevin as a child, but also Kevin as a rich kid defending his impressive fortress.”
Happy holidays!
