Let’s Hope Macaulay Culkin’s Christmas Tour Is Less Sad Than Chevy Chase’s

This winter, Macaulay Culkin will give the Home Alone film franchise the holiday tour Q&A cash-in treatment. Good luck to anyone who tries to sneak into the screenings.

It’s an American holiday tradition for families to crowd around the living room on a chilly night with mugs full of hot cocoa and a bowl full of microwave popcorn and watch their favorite Christmas comedies. Out in the Midwest, Middle America takes this custom one step further as countless fans of classic films like National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation are happy to fill up the minivan and brave the frozen tundra to see 80-year-old Chevy Chase plug in the festive string lights at a Raising Cane’s at 8 p.m. on a Wednesday in November. For some reason only Illinois anthropologists can identify, the Christmas comedies of the 1980s and 1990s are still incredibly bankable appearance opportunities for the films’ stars, many of whom haven’t had steady screen work in at least a decade and one of whom has been chased out of Hollywood over his ho-ho-horrendous use of racial slurs on set. 

Or put more simply, every holiday season, Chase goes on tour across the Midwest and parts of Pennsylvania to attend screenings and Q&A sessions for his festive films in an annual reminder that, at one point, we all loved the comedy superstar like an onscreen father. This year, though, he’ll have some formidable competition cornering the Christmas comedy nostalgia market as Culkin mounts his own speaking tour with “Home Alone: A Nostalgic Night with Macaulay Culkin.”

“Relive the iconic scenes and heartwarming moments from Home Alone on the big screen, and then dive deep into the behind-the-scenes stories and insights with Macaulay Culkin himself,” the tour description reads. “Hear about his experiences on set, his favorite memories from filming and his take on why this movie has become such a beloved holiday classic.” Beginning November 30th, Culkin, now 44, will take the screening and Q&A session to 14 different small-to-midsized cities ranging from Buffalo to Louisville with plenty of stops in the Heartland in between.

As opposed to Chase’s annual and mostly-seated nostalgia tour, Culkin’s decision to dust off his best aftershave face and cash a dozen-or-so paychecks this Christmas season doesn’t feel quite as desperate. For starters, Culkin’s acting career both still exists and isn’t punctuated by countless horror stories of bad behavior behind-the-scenes — Culkin recently appeared in the incredible The Righteous Gemstones and starred in the 10th season of American Horror Story, which has yet to give the terrifying anthology treatment to the setting of Chase’s green room.

And, honestly, nobody deserves to cash in on their 34-year-old, career-defining film more than the grown-up child star who famously had to take his own parents to court when he was still a kid to get control of his own trust fund and the ample royalties stashed within it. The fact that the biggest child star of the 1990s is well-adjusted enough to make jokes, shoot commercials and answer questions about his early work is a rare success story for an industry with a terrible track record when it comes to kids in general.

So enjoy the tour, Macaulay — just make sure that no neighbor kids are pawing around the tour bus when you do your head count.