Home Alone
Home Alone
[Aged man standing at the head of a flight of stairs. A paint can on a rope is swinging into a child at the foot of the stairs. A child on the floor is in a semi-fetal position and crying.] Child: Ow!! Child on floor: Waaaaaaaaa! Rejected movie ideas: Age-reversed Home Alone reboot.

Home Alone is a popular 1990 film in which the child protagonist Kevin McCallister (portrayed by Macaulay Culkin ) is accidentally left alone in his house when his family goes on vacation, and has to thwart a burglary all by himself. In the movie, McCallister comes up with a variety of ingenious traps and schemes (usually involving jury-rigged toys and household items) to harass, injure and eventually incapacitate the burglars, which was the film's defining feature. On a more general level, the films revolve around the classical trope with an underdog defeating a much stronger opponent (the burglars), through his own ingenuity. The film spawned a series of sequels (4 as of 2012, the first of which also starred Culkin) all with a similar premise to the original.
This strip, however, proposes a reboot of the franchise, with the main change to the film being that of an age-reversal, so the story is now about an adult man setting needlessly harmful traps to hurt defenseless children breaking into his house. This would likely be seen as distasteful at the very least, and would probably lead to a negative reputation for the film. The title text adds another punchline when it is revealed that the reboot also stars Macaulay Culkin in the same role. This may suggest that the age-reversal gimmick was done to allow for him to star in the film as the same character despite growing up since the beginning of the franchise. This would be a rather misguided attempt to revive his career, and would probably just prevent any further success.
The scene depicted in the strip is an adaptation of an iconic scene from the first movie (used heavily in advertising) where McCallister hangs two paint cans in strings above the staircase, and let them swing down to hit the burglars in the face.
[Aged man standing at the head of a flight of stairs. A paint can on a rope is swinging into a child at the foot of the stairs. A child on the floor is in a semi-fetal position and crying.] Child: Ow!! Child on floor: Waaaaaaaaa! Rejected movie ideas: Age-reversed Home Alone reboot.
