\n<\/p>\n
The battle in \u201cHome Alone\u201d between 8-year-old Kevin McCallister (Macaulay Culkin) and two burglars known as the Wet Bandits has unfolded on screens around the world every Christmas since the film premiered in 1990.<\/p>\n
And each year, for some viewers, the McCallisters\u2019 grand home and lifestyle inspires its own tradition: wondering just how rich this family was.<\/p>\n
The New York Times turned to economists and people involved with the film to find the answer.<\/p>\n
Early in the film, one of the burglars, Harry (Joe Pesci<\/a>), tells his fellow Wet Bandit, Marv (Daniel Stern), that the McCallister home is their top target in a wealthy neighborhood.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \u201cThat\u2019s the one, Marv, that\u2019s the silver tuna,\u201d Harry says, before speculating that the house contains a lot of \u201ctop-flight goods,\u201d including VCRs<\/a>, stereos, very fine jewelry and \u201codd marketable securities.\u201d<\/p>\n The home is the best clue as to how much money the McCallisters have.<\/p>\n The silver tuna, or its exterior anyway, 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<\/a>. It appears to have enough space for Kevin and his four siblings to each have their own rooms, but also can accommodate an army of visitors.<\/p>\n In 1990, the house was affordable only for the top 1 percent of Chicago household incomes, and that would still be the case today, according to economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n The economists \u2014 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 \u2014 made this determination after looking at data including household incomes in the Chicago metropolitan statistical area for 1990 and 2022, the house\u2019s property value, prevailing mortgage rates at the time, and typical taxes and insurance.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Working with the assumption that the McCallisters did not spend more than 30 percent of their income on housing, the economists also determined the home would have been affordable to a household with an income of $305,000 in 1990 (about $665,000 in 2022).<\/p>\n In the middle of 2022, a similar house would cost about $2.4 million, based on the Zillow estimate for the \u201cHome Alone\u201d house<\/a>. A home of that value would be affordable to a household with income of $730,000, which would be in the top 1 percent of Chicago-area households, the economists said.<\/p>\n \u201cHome Alone\u201d never explains what the parents do for work.<\/p>\n On the internet, where this question regularly pops up, some people have suggested Kate McCallister is a fashion designer, because the house has several mannequins inside, which later feature in one of Kevin\u2019s attempts to trick the burglars into thinking he is not, in fact, home alone.<\/p>\n Todd Strasser, who wrote the official novelizations of \u201cHome Alone\u201d and two of its sequels, said in an interview that he was not closely supervised by the filmmakers. The guidance, he said, was essentially: \u201cHere\u2019s the script, do whatever you want.\u201d<\/p>\n So in the book, he made Kevin\u2019s mom a fashion designer, because of the mannequins, and Kevin\u2019s dad a businessman, because it was \u201ca safe bet,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n He said it never occurred to him to explain in detail how the McCallisters had come by their money; he thought they were \u201cupper middle class\u201d but not \u201csuper rich.\u201d<\/p>\n The family has other trappings of significant-but-not-stratospheric wealth: They wear nice clothes and hire multiple vans to take them to the airport, yes, but when Kate is trying to bribe an elderly couple to give up their tickets from Paris so she can get home, she offers jewelry and cash, but hints that her Rolex might be fake.<\/p>\n \u201cI don\u2019t know how much the McCallisters made, but it sure did a lot for my bank account,\u201d Strasser said.<\/p>\n One fan theory<\/a> posits that Peter McCallister is involved with organized crime. Under this theory, the McCallister home was specifically targeted as some sort of vendetta, and Kevin\u2019s brutal violence<\/a> against the burglars is the product of an upbringing exposed to criminal activity.<\/p>\n The Times could not rule out this theory.<\/p>\n A commonly cited data point on the family\u2019s wealth is their Christmas trip to Paris.<\/p>\n Flying 15 people to Paris is expensive, especially with the four adults flying first class, but Kevin\u2019s parents don\u2019t pay for the airplane tickets. Early in the film<\/a>, Kate McCallister tells a police officer \u2014 who is actually Harry in disguise \u2014 that her husband\u2019s brother paid for the flights.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n That brother is Uncle Rob. He is a minor figure in the first film, but the few mentions he does get suggest that he is loaded. He pays for the tickets, and he has an apartment in Paris that has a clear view of the Eiffel Tower and can somehow house 15 of his family members. (The film\u2019s sequel, \u201cHome Alone 2: Lost in New York,\u201d further suggests that Uncle Rob is wealthy, but this analysis is based only on the first film.)<\/p>\n A third brother, Uncle Frank (the mean one), lives in Ohio and travels with the family from Illinois to Paris. We do not learn anything about his income, but we do know he is cheap. At his brother\u2019s house in Illinois, he avoids paying the $122.50 pizza bill. On the plane, dining in first class, he tells his wife to slip the crystal glasses in her purse.<\/p>\n This behavior could suggest that he is wealthy. Shoplifting was \u201csignificantly more common\u201d among people with family incomes over $70,000, according to a 2008 article published in the American Journal of Psychiatry<\/a>.<\/p>\nHow are they so rich?<\/h2>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
Uncle Rob paid for the flights.<\/h2>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n