If Home Alone 2: Lost In New York director Chris Columbus had his way, Donald Trump would be removed from the classic film.
The award-winning filmmaker, also known for Mrs. Doubtfire and the Harry Potter film series, said the US President’s seven-second appearance in the 1992 movie has “become this curse. It’s become an albatross for me. I just wish it was gone.”
“I can’t cut it,” he said in a new San Francisco Chronicle interview, adding: “If I cut it, I’ll probably be sent out of the country. I’ll be considered sort of not fit to live in the United States, so I’ll have to go back to Italy or something.”
Home Alone 2 – starring Macaulay Culkin as a precocious child who mistakenly arrives in New York City instead of his family’s vacation destination of Miami, Florida – was a box office blockbuster, raking in US$359mil in theatres. The film and its prequel, Home Alone, are considered classic holiday fare.
For a few seconds in the movie, the youngster briefly meets Trump, then a real estate mogul, at the Plaza Hotel. The future star of The Apprentice owned the luxurious property at the time.
Columbus previously stated that Trump more or less “bullied his way into the movie.”
“We paid the fee, but he also said, ‘The only way you can use the Plaza is if I’m in the movie’,” Columbus told Business Insider in 2020.
“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.’”
The cameo, however, hasn’t aged well for some fans.
During the third year of his first presidential term, the film was edited to remove the Trump scene during reairings in Canada.
The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation confirmed in 2019 that the scene was axed to make room for commercials. – New York Daily News/Tribune News Service
