Uncle Buck (film): The film that made Home Alone

It's the Christmas Season and almost certainly Macaulay Culkin is getting his annual paycheck for the only film he ever really needed to be in to live a pretty comfortable life forevermore. It is worth knowing that had it not been for his supporting role in a movie made just one year earlier, it is very conceivable that he would not have been cast in the iconic Christmas film that is Home Alone, and that movie was Uncle Buck.

Macaulay was not the star of this movie, John Candy, who was one of the biggest comedy stars in the late 80's and was consequently box-office gold, was. His films would regularly require only $10-20 million to produce and would, like clockwork, bring in 2 to 3 times that much with little to no marketing.

It seemed he could do no wrong and Uncle Buck was one of those situations. You see, this is not a great film and a lot of the comedy is dependent upon silly situations such as his interaction with teenagers where they are inexplicably terrified of him despite the fact that he is not an imposing physical force.

However, his interactions with young child actors Gaby Hoffmann and of course Macaulay Culkin, is where this film truly shines. I think that Culkin must have been really easy to work with because he really impressed director John Hughes who would just one year later, go on to write and produce Home Alone which was written specifically for Macaulay.

In a bit of role-reversal John Candy's role in Home Alone was completed in one day and he was paid a mere $414 for his involvement (it was done as a favor for John Hughes.)

I suppose Uncle Buck could be considered decent but if you were going to seek out a John Candy movie to watch, Planes, Trains, and Automobiles is the crème de la crème IMO.

So there you have it. If it weren't for this film there might have either not been a Home Alone or a different person starring in it because even though the film was written with Macaulay specifically, director Chris Colombus still auditioned over 100 other child actors just to make sure. There are other factors as well but even John Hughes admitted that Uncle Buck was a "trial run" of sorts to see how working with Macaulay was gonna be.