In 2023, Home Alone was selected for preservation in the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".

The McCallister family prepares to spend Christmas in Paris, gathering at Kate and Peter's home in a Chicago suburb on the night before their departure.

Kevin inadvertently ruins the family dinner after a scuffle with his oldest brother Buzz, resulting in Kate sending him up to the attic.

During the night, heavy winds create a power outage, disabling the alarm clocks and causing the family to oversleep.

Kevin wakes to find the house empty and the family cars still in the garage, unaware that they had rented vans to take them to the airport.

Later, Kevin becomes frightened by his eccentric next-door neighbor, "Old Man" Marley, rumored to be a serial killer nicknamed the "South-Bend Shovel Slayer" who murdered his own family.

The McCallister home is soon stalked by the "Wet Bandits", Harry and Marv, a pair of burglars who have been breaking into other vacant houses in the neighborhood.

Kate realizes mid-flight that Kevin was left behind, and upon arrival in Paris, the family discovers that all flights for the next two days are booked, and that the phone lines are still down back home in Chicago.

[5] Home Alone was initially set to be financed and distributed by Warner Bros. Hughes promised that he could make the movie for less than $10 million, considerably less than most feature film production budgets of that era.

Concerned that the film might exceed that amount, Hughes met secretly with 20th Century Fox before production to see if they would fund the project if Warner Bros. proved inflexible.

[9][10] Columbus did an uncredited rewrite of the script; among his contributions was the character of Old Man Marley, which he created to give the story a more serious layer, as well as a more emotional, happier ending.

[10][12] John Mulaney was asked to audition for the role of Kevin after being scouted in a children's sketch comedy group, but his parents refused the opportunity.

Daniel Roebuck was hired to replace him, but after two days of rehearsal, Columbus felt he was lacking chemistry with Pesci and brought back Stern.

[26] In addition, the scene where Kevin wades in his neighbor's flooded basement was shot at the empty swimming pool of the aforementioned campus of New Trier High School, with the American Airlines DC-10 first class cabin interiors done on the basketball courts.

Like much of the film, most of the sequence was shot with low, wide angles that, according to journalist Darryn King, "capture the action as if a child were perceiving it".

[6] After he took the assistant director by the collar one day to complain about this, daily call times were moved back from 7 to 9 a.m. to accommodate his rounds.

[30] On the other end of the schedule, the crew had limited time to film the many nighttime scenes, since Culkin could not work any later than 10 p.m. due to his age.

[10] Pesci said in a 2022 interview with People of working with Culkin, "I intentionally limited my interactions with him to preserve the dynamic" and made sure not "to come across on the screen that we were in any way friendly" in order to "maintain the integrity of the adversarial relationship".

[32][12] Pesci's use of "cartoon cursing", or menacing gibberish, garnered comparisons to Looney Tunes character Yosemite Sam.

[35] Senta Moses, who played Tracy, recalled in 2020 that one of the most difficult scenes to shoot was the family's run through O'Hare International Airport to catch their flight.

"There were thousands of extras, all expertly choreographed so none of us would be in danger running at full speed through the American Airlines terminal", she told The Hollywood Reporter.

Originally scheduled to be released on Thanksgiving weekend, its opening date was brought forward to avoid direct competition with Three Men and a Little Lady.

[46] The film was reissued again on DVD and Blu-ray on October 6, 2015, alongside all four of its sequels in a box set titled Home Alone: 25th Anniversary Ultimate Collector's Christmas Edition.

The website's critical consensus reads, "Home Alone's uneven but frequently funny premise stretched unreasonably thin is buoyed by Macaulay Culkin's cute performance and strong supporting stars.

He compared the elaborate booby-traps in the film to Rube Goldberg machines, writing "they're the kinds of traps that any 8-year-old could devise, if he had a budget of tens of thousands of dollars and the assistance of a crew of movie special effects people" and criticized the plot as "so implausible that it makes it hard for [him] to really care about the plight of the kid [Kevin]".

[68] Adrian Turner of Radio Times called the movie "a celebration of enterprise that captured the heart and wickedness of every child on the planet.

[80] Christopher Hooton of The Independent also praised the film, calling the film-within-a-film Angels with Filthy Souls "a fond footnote in cinema history".

[109] On December 19, 2018, Culkin again reprised his role as McCallister in a 60-second advertisement for Google Assistant titled Home Alone Again, which parodies the original film.

[125] The fifth film, The Holiday Heist, premiered during ABC Family's Countdown to 25 Days of Christmas programming event on November 25, 2012.

"[128] Another idea that was once discussed involved an adult Kevin attempting revenge on Harry and Marv, who have reformed in the years since they last met.