One of the early movies to feature Black Widow star Scarlett Johansson was Home Alone 3, in which she played Molly Pruitt, the sister of Alex D. Lind’s Alex Pruitt. Recently, after her six-year-old daughter became a fan of the first two films in the franchise, Johansson reportedly decided to do a little experiment, and see whether her daughter would recognize the 11-year-old verison of her mom when she came up onscreen. The verdict? Well, apparently not, but when asked, the child quickly picked up the conenction and was able to answer “who’s that person? without any trouble at all.
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The conversation came up in a new profile of Johansson, who said that during the pandemic, her family had dug into the archives for some entertainment. So, enter Home Alone 3.
“I just wanted her to make the discovery,” Johansson told People. “Of course, she didn’t because how can an 11-year-old me remind her of me now? And I said, ‘Who’s that person?!’ She was like, ‘You?’”
Home Alone 3‘s biggest claim to fame at this point may be having Johansson in it. While the first film was a massive blockbuster, and the second a sizable hit in its own right, by the time the third movie rolled around, the franchise was in free fall. With none of the original stars coming back, Kevin McCallister was retired in favor of Alex Pruitt, presumably in the hopes of giving the franchise a fresh start. Without Kevin, though, the third film earned almost $300 million less at the box office than the second one hand, dropping from $359 million to $79 million.
That was still technically enough for the movie to make decent money, considering that it cost less than $30 million to make. In all likelihood, a family comedy that earned that return on investment but didn’t come with the expectation of being part of one of the biggest franchises in the world, would have been considered a success. Instead, the next Home Alone movie was a made-for-TV follow-up in which the McCallister parents are getting divorced, and Kevin ends up “home” alone at a palace where his dad’s girlfriend is staying. For some reason, after that, it took about ten years for another installment in the franchise to be greenlit. That movie, Home Alone: The Holiday Heist, would be the first made without the involvement of series creator John Hughes, who passed away in 2009. A new reboot of the franchise is coming to Disney+ later this year.
