MILWAUKEE — Months after the 1990 film “Home Alone” smashed box office records, the movie’s writer and producer, the legendary John Hughes, started to work on a sequel which would eventually become 1992’s “Home Alone 2: Lost in New York.”
The sequel, just like the original, made hundreds of millions of dollars at the box office and spawned dozens of toys and video games. Over the past 30 years, it’s become one of a handful of holiday movies which airs several times a day on television this time of year.
But was Kevin McCallister actually on the verge of spending “Home Alone 2” lost in Wisconsin instead of spending it lost in New York?
According to a post on IMDb’s ever-changing trivia page for the film: Yes, he was.
“In the original script, Kevin wasn’t supposed to go to New York. It was meant to be called, ‘Home Alone 2: Lost in Milwaukee,’” the post read.
Where this cheese curd-sized tidbit of unverified trivia originated is anyone’s guess, but time spent down a rabbit hole to try and disprove it has proven to be, so far, impossible.
“What I did was a number of versions,” John Hughes, who wrote and produced both “Home Alone” and “Home Alone 2,” said in a 1992 interview. “I was looking for [a script] that would jump out.”
Hughes went on to say that he wrote four full versions of the sequel in the summer of 1991, all in a quest to surpass the standard he set with “Home Alone.”
“I picked the best one which I thought was New York,” Hughes added, possibly implying that the other three scripts weren’t set there.
An additional “Home Alone 2” trivia post on IMDb also hinted Wisconsin could have been a logical spot for Macauley Culkin’s character to wander away to, as he would have been far more likely to run into a beloved character from the first film in the Badger State than he might have elsewhere.
“John Candy was, at one point, going to do a cameo in this movie,” that post reads.
Candy, of course, played Gus Polinski in “Home Alone.” The self-proclaimed “Polka King of the Midwest” and his band, “The Kenosha Kickers,” were working to navigate their way home to Wisconsin when they ran into Kevin’s stranded mom, played by Catherine O’Hara.
“Oh, jeez — if you have to get to Chicago, we’ll gladly drive you,” Polinski told Kate McCallister in “Home Alone.’ “It’s on the way to Milwaukee.”
Candy, of course, never appeared in the sequel and the comedy legend died just a couple of years later in 1994.
Meanwhile, Hughes, who wrote, produced and directed so many iconic films including “The Breakfast Club,” “Uncle Buck” and “Planes, Trains & Automobiles,” died in 2009. Perhaps the “Lost in Milwaukee” story died with him.
With concrete answers to any of this proving harder to find than a loose spider in a house, Spectrum News 1 turned to someone who’s spent a lot of time watching and researching “Home Alone” for the hit Netflix docuseries, “The Movies That Made Us”: Brian Volk-Weiss, founder and CEO of The Nacelle Company, a production and media company based in Los Angeles.
“We did a good four months of research on the first movie and 0.0 seconds of research on the second,” Volk-Weiss, an inductee of The Pop Culture Hall of Fame, said. “I don’t know anything about the second movie. I’ve only seen the second movie once.”
Volk-Weiss, though, said that the success of “Home Alone 2” was more about whom they got to return to make the movie and not necessarily where the movie was set.
“I think what they did was they got the whole cast back together, and that should not be taken for granted,” Volk-Weiss said. “That’s not an easy thing to do, back then or now. I think based on my memory that they did a pretty good job, kind of like J.J. Abrams first Star Wars film, ‘The Force Awakens’ — there was enough old and enough new to make it work.”
Assuming for a minute that any of this is true — that Hughes had at least toyed with the idea of setting and shooting “Home Alone 2” in Milwaukee, which is roughly 65 miles north of the McCallister’s home in Winnetka, Illinois, as opposed to New York which is 800 miles away — where might they have shot?
Milwaukee historian John Gurda had some ideas, in spite of Wisconsin’s relatively infrequent visits by larger Hollywood productions.
“That’s not been our claim to fame,” Gurda laughed.
We asked Gurda to swap out the main “Home Alone 2” filming locations set in New York — The Plaza Hotel, Central Park, Duncan’s Toy Chest and the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree — for comparable replacements in Milwaukee in 1991, when production began on the actual sequel.
“The Pfister Hotel was restored by then and it was the ‘Grande Dame’ of the downtown hotels for sure,” Gurda said. “Lake Park would have had enough space — Lake Park would have been a good surrogate [for Central Park].”
As for Duncan’s Toy Chest, a fictional toy store created for the movie and shot in Chicago, Gurda said Milwaukee had a very real replacement.
“The Grand Avenue Mall opened in 1982 and there was a really high-end toy store on the second level: Puzzle Box,” Gurda said. “Even if you didn’t buy anything, it was just fun to hang around there.”
Finally, for the finale of the film, assuming the script had remained relatively unchanged, Gurda said Kevin and his mom could have reunited in Milwaukee’s Cathedral Square, or they could have met near the city’s official Christmas tree, which that year was close to City Hall.
“The city Christmas tree moved around some,” Gurda said. “I think in 1991, it was in Red Arrow Park, where the skating rink is.”
Alas, our festive investigation left us where we started: With a movie production in Milwaukee that never was, a script that might never have been to begin with, but a fun escape for fans of the films in Wisconsin to imagine what might have been.