Macaulay Culkin is Onboard With Digitally Removing Donald Trump From ‘Home Alone 2’
Something you might not know if you’re a normal person is that there is a pretty big market for edited, bowdlerized versions of Hollywood movies that take out all the sex and violence and swearing so Christian households can feel good about watching about five minutes of a film that probably now says Inglourious Armyguys on the DVD case.
A Utah company called CleanFlicks was forced to close because courts ruled that their service of making “clean” cuts of films was essentially film piracy, and there’s a company called ClearPlay that actually skips pre-defined portions of legitimate copies of movies in real-time to avoid the same fate.
If you’ve ever wondered what would possess someone to actually use this service instead of not watching a movie if it offend them or god forbid accepting the original vision of the writer and director, maybe think about how you might feel watching Home Alone 2 and seeing Donald Trump pop up on screen.
It’s pretty widely known that if you wanted to film a movie on one of Trump’s properties back in the day, Trump would insist on filming a cameo, as himself, in the film, like an orange Stan Lee who no one was really excited to see. Most people just let him do whatever and only pretended there was film in the camera, but for some reason his cameo in Home Alone 2 actually made it into the film.
The cameo actually survived to the final cut because test audiences genuinely enjoyed it; at the time, Trump was basically using his wealth to make himself a household name, cultivating an image that didn’t extend much beyond “I’m a rich businessman, I have money, Trump means rich person.”
That’s not really his image today.
So people have been suggesting digitally removing Donald Trump from the film, maybe replacing him with Jabba the Hutt or something, I don’t know.
Even Macaulay Culkin seems to be on board with the idea.
Sold.
— Macaulay Culkin (@IncredibleCulk) January 13, 2021
I mean, he said “sold” when someone suggested replacing Trump with an older Culkin, which would make an interesting twist on the film.
He also gave a “bravo” to someone who removed Trump from the film. Kind of.
Bravo.
— Macaulay Culkin (@IncredibleCulk) January 13, 2021
That’s actually just kind of funny.
I don’t personally support editing Hollywood films by companies looking to make them the same for Christians or to remove Donald Trump. Sometimes you just have to let things from the past be problematic. They give a window into the time period that they’re from, and that’s more important than protecting our modern sensibilities.
