While they’ve already been popular since their initial release, Home Alone and National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation seem to have gotten more intensely popular over the years. Every Christmas, channels broadcast the classics on repeat and streaming services offer them and other popular holiday films to view with family and friends. Now that nostalgia is lucrative, many new products have been released to merchandise on the movies’ continued rampant popularity. Nowadays, fans also love to analyze details they’ve never fully picked up on before and discuss the semantics of plot elements.
A recent slew of online jokes inquire about how rich Kevin McCallister’s family actually is. The home from Home Alone is extravagant for a suburban household and displays a certain sense of luxury. Plotwise, it has to be the perfect target for burglars as well as provide room and resources for all of Kevin’s traps. Entertainment Weekly recently reported on The Federal Reserve’s calculation of the family’s net worth. While it isn’t explicitly said what Kevin’s parents do, there are a lot of details that Kate may be in fashion with loads of fabric, sewing machines and display mannequins on hand. And Peter McCallister was just assumed to be a businessman of some kind. This IS a John Hughes movie, after all. EW relays The New York Times taking a look at the McCallister finances and state, “The Fed says that the McCallisters were definitely part of the 1 percent. According to their numbers, Peter (John Heard) and Kate McCallister (Catherine O’Hara) would have needed to earn at least $305,000 annually in 1990 — or about $665,000 in 2022 — to comfortably afford that house, which is located on the North shore in Chicago. (A Zillow estimate priced the house at about $2.4 million in 2022.) Those numbers today would put the McCallisters in the top 1 percent of Chicago-area earners.”
Meanwhile, The Hollywood Reporter outlined how film fans began a discussion on Reddit about Clark Griswold’s bonus from Christmas Vacation. A Redditor posted, “Clark had a direct interaction with the CEO of the company (a company making cereal in Chicago, so maybe Kellogg). But the CEO didn’t care enough to remember Clark’s name. So I’d put Clark at Senior Manager or Director level. I’d wager he was making $77-$80k in 1989, so his bonus was probably about 25 percent…. On a $80k salary, a 25% bonus would be $20K.” Another Redditor added some context, “He also made a breakthrough on non-nutritive cereal varnish…mentioned a few times in the film.”