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25 years ago - November 16, 1990

Home Alone
You know the old Hollywood saying: Never work with kids or animals...unless they can make you rich. Writer/director John Hughes became well known in the mid 1980s for his high school comedies, and had directed Macaulay Culkin along with John Candy in Uncle Buck in 1989. Hughes wrote the screenplay for Home Alone, but this movie was directed by Chris Columbus, who had written The Goonies and directed Adventures in Babysitting. Home Alone, of course, is a comedy about an eight-year-old who defends his home from a pair of burglars called “The Wet Bandits” (Joe Pesci and Daniel Stern) after his family takes off for Christmas vacation without him. Reviews weren’t stellar, but the audience response was phenomenal.

Home Alone opened at #1 with $17.0 million from 1,202 theaters - the best wide opening average of the year. Audiences kept it at #1 for 12 straight weeks into February, and by the time it left theaters in June 1991 it had pulled in $277 million. This put Home Alone at #3 in the all-time domestic box office list (not adjusted for inflation) behind E.T. and Star Wars, and it still holds the record for highest grossing live-action comedy ever. Naturally, a sequel followed in 1992, which still performed very well for the year but earned $100 million less than the original movie. Chris Columbus went on to helm the first two movies in another massive franchise: Harry Potter.

Rocky V
Rocky IV saw the death of Apollo Creed and the defeat of communism (though it would take four more years for the Berlin Wall to come down). This sequel takes a much more local approach, with Rocky bankrupt and retired, and playing off the relationship with his son (Stallone’s own son Sage) vs. the mentorship Rocky provides to an up-and-coming boxer named Tommy Gunn (real life boxer Tommy Morrison, who later won the WBO Heavyweight Championship in a 1993 fight against George Foreman). Richard Grant portrays a caricature of Don King, playing up the seedy side of the boxing business. The traditional Rocky movie climax with a ring fight is replaced in this story with a street fight. Reviews were poor and audiences clearly chose Home Alone instead. Rocky V opened at #2 with $14.0 million from 2,053 theaters (less than half the average of Home Alone). It grossed only $40 million in the U.S., the weakest performer of the franchise. The film also earned seven Razzie Award nominations. It would be another 16 years before Stallone returned to the series with Rocky Balboa, and the story continues this Thanksgiving with Michael B. Jordan starring as the son of Apollo in Creed.

The Rescuers Down Under
Disney had a success with with their animated adventure The Rescuers in 1977, spawning this sequel (one of the few in Disney’s history of animated films). Bob Newhart and Eva Gabor return to voice Bernard and Miss Bianca, a pair of mice who solve problems just like secret agents. John Candy provides the voice of an albatross. The plot’s setting in in Australia may have been influenced by the success of Crocodile Dundee four years earlier. This was an unusual Disney animated release in that it featured no musical numbers. Reviews were decent but it did not fare well against the competition for an audience this weekend, resulting in the weakest box office performance of Disney’s modern releases. The Rescuers Down Under opened at #4 behind last week’s Child’s Play 2 with $3.5 million from 1,230 theaters. It grossed just under $28 million in the U.S., a fraction of the $79 million earned by The Little Mermaid the year before.

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