If you want to feel old, I think all I need to tell you is that Kevin McCallister is 45. Yes, the kid from Home Alone is no kid, and while I certainly understood that in a technical sense, a new ad campaign is making me feel it in a way I wasn’t expecting. That's because Kevin being an adult old enough to have kids of his own, also means his mom is getting up there, so he's back to help take care of her.
Macaulay Culkin has “reprised” his role as Kevin in a new ad campaign for Home Instead, a senior care company. The ad (posted by ET) shows Kevin covering the house from Home Alone in bubble wrap in order to keep his aging mother safe, when he meets the granddaughter of an old friend. Check it out:
Certainly, those of us who are about the same age as Macaulay Culkin and who saw Home Alone as kids are probably all feeling more than a little old right now. It is perhaps a fitting product for Culkin to be selling, which is in itself kind of wild.
It’s really nice to see him having some fun with the character, though. Not every actor who gets attached to a single role as hard as he has really appreciates it, which often means they won’t do this sort of thing. Culkin himself did seem to try to distance himself from Home Alone for a long time, but in recent years, it seems he’s come to terms with it.
This isn’t the first time that Macaulay Culkin has used his Home Alone character in an ad campaign. He previously did ads for Uber Eats as Kevin, reenacting various famous scenes from Home Alone as an adult. He also did an ad for Google's virtual assistant. It was all pretty funny. This ad is actually surprisingly heartwarming, though that’s maybe not a surprise given the subject matter.
With the Christmas season on the way, there will likely be a lot of people returning to Home Alone as an annual rewatch. It is one of the best Christmas movies ever, after all. This makes the timing for the ad quite perfect, certainly intentionally so. In fact, the ad might make people think about the movie and want to go watch it. This is good news if you have a Disney+ subscription, as that’s the current place to find the movie if you don’t own a physical copy.
This is being called a “series” of ads, so there may be more that put Culkin in other famous Home Alone locations or have him interacting with other characters. Maybe Catherine O’Hara will appear eventually as Kevin’s mom. That would be a heartwarming Christmas reunion.
