The director who accused Ryan Reynolds of desecrating cinema: “This is an insult to the art”
Discovering that a celebrated Hollywood director once accused Ryan Reynolds of insulting the art of cinema is, depressingly, not that big a surprise. After all, when it comes to Reynolds’ filmography, especially in the last decade, the only sane response isn’t to deny he desecrated cinema; it’s to ask, “Which time are you referring to?”
Amusingly, though, when Home Alone director Christopher Columbus raked Reynolds over the coals, it was for a movie he was supposed to produce that never even saw the light of day. Columbus may have watched the likes of Green Lantern, 6 Underground, Red Notice, and The Adam Project and agreed with most of the populace that they made the medium of cinema worse simply by existing, but they weren’t what prompted him to blast Reynolds in public.
Instead, the thing that truly got under Columbus’ skin was a real “This time, it’s personal” situation. You see, in 2018, it was announced that Reynolds would produce Stoned Alone, a stoner comedy about a 20-something loser who misses his flight for a ski trip, and while he’s in his supposedly empty home, thieves arrive to rob the place. He then gets in a series of comically violent mishaps as his paranoia increases and he defends his homestead, most likely with an escalating set of booby traps.
Naturally, as this description would suggest, Stoned Alone was heavily inspired by the Macauley Culkin-starring Christmas classic that Columbus made in 1990. The gag of updating it to be about an adult man-child fighting off intruders while baked out of his mind convinced Reynolds to champion the movie, and soon, director Augustine Frizzell (Never Goin’ Back) came on board, too.
In 2020, though, while taking part in an oral history of his most famous work, Columbus took the opportunity to go after Reynolds for having the temerity to mess with a classic. “The reboots are just silly to me,” he grumbled. “When I read about something called Stoned Alone, they were going to do with Ryan – it was an R-rated Home Alone movie about stoners – I thought to myself, ‘This is just an insult to the art of cinema.'”
Columbus – whose filmography also includes a few little movies you may have heard of, like Mrs Doubtfire and Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone – was particularly rankled by the notion that Reynolds and company weren’t taking Home Alone seriously. To him, all cinema is sacred, even if it’s a live-action family cartoon in which a small boy tortures criminals in ways that would make the CIA blush. So, rehashing something pure by adding in drugs and adult situations didn’t sit well with him.
“If you’re making a comedy, a musical – no matter what film I’m making – my goal is to treat it with the same respect as if I were making The Godfather,” Columbus explained. “Home Alone is not The Godfather, but you have to treat it with that kind of respect and this idea of remaking things that already exist and are working well? Watch the original! Forget about it. It’s just never going to be as good.”
In the end, perhaps Columbus’s outburst had a tangible effect on Stoned Alone, because there hasn’t been a single update about the project since 2018. This means it may simply be in development hell, but is still a priority for the studio; equally, it may mean the whole endeavour has been scrapped entirely. In turn, this may have forced Reynolds to continue his quest to find new ways to desecrate cinema, such as Free Guy and IF.
Then, as a fun addendum to the whole sorry affair, in 2021, an egregious Home Alone sequel entitled Home Sweet Home Alone arrived on Disney+. Columbus wasn’t happy about that, either, as he thought it was a reboot, which led to him grousing to ReelBlend, “What’s the point? The movie exists, let’s just live with the movie that existed.”
