Home Alone is often a topic around the holidays, but over the past couple of months it has actually been the film’s sequel Home Alone 2: Lost In New York that became a large talking point in pop culture. First, the sequel’s Pigeon Lady revealed she spends her holidays home alone, then a petition rolled around asking that Donald Trump’s cameo be removed from Home Alone 2 and more recently both Macaulay Culkin and Donald Trump commented on the movie.
As I said, Home Alone 2 has been very prominent lately. The most recent touchstone actually came about after the actor’s union SAG-AFTRA was moving forward with procedures to remove Donald Trump, who had been in the Union --and even has his own Hollywood star -- after appearing in a slew of productions in both movies and on television over the past several decades.
Instead, President Donald Trump decided to simply quit the Union in a very specific manner, releasing a statement to SAG-AFTRA President President Gabrielle Carteris that mentioned how “proud” he is of the work he put in for movies including Home Alone 2.
While I’m not familiar with your work, I’m very proud of my work on movies such as Home Alone 2, Zoolander and Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps; and television shows including The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, Saturday Night Live, and of course, one of the most successful shows in television history, The Apprentice – to name just a few!
The timing is more related to Gabrielle Carteris wanting to oust former President Trump after the riot incidents in the Capitol that occurred back in January. But it also ties in with the petition to remove Donald Trump from Home Alone 2 that ran around Twitter (and also on Change.org) after a fan digitally removed Trump from the scene in the movie.
That video was lauded by Home Alone 2 star Macaulay Culkin and subsequently went viral in a post Culkin said “bravo” to.
Chris Columbus, who directed Home Alone 2 in 1992, said late last year that he had added the Donald Trump moment only came about after Trump himself requested to be in the film. Home Alone 2 wanted to shoot in the Plaza and that was what allegedly, mentioning to Insider that Trump said:
‘The only way you can use the Plaza is if I'm in the movie.’ 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.’ But he did bully his way into the movie.
In the time since all of this happened and Donald Trump ultimately stepped down, SAG-AFTRA took steps so that the former film and TV personality could not be re-admitted. This week, the board voted and confirmed that any application for “re-admission” by Donald Trump would not be considered. Gabrielle Carteris called it “more than a symbolic step,” noting in a press release that behaving in a threatening manner will “not be tolerated.”
