How ‘Home Alone’ Tried to Trick Us Into Craving Pizza
Pretty much every aspect of the Home Alone series is wildly appealing to young children, from eating ice cream for dinner, to trashing your abusive sibling’s room, to using cutting-edge cassette tape technology to scam Donald Trump’s businesses.
Kevin McCallister also made countless audience members’ mouths water at the sight of piping hot cheese pizza, both in the original 1990 film and the follow-up, Home Alone 2: Lost in New York.
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The pizza-Home Alone connection is so strong that Disney recently partnered with real world pizza chain Prince Street Pizza to sell the film’s fictional “Little Nero’s Pizza,” news which will no doubt interest both fans and Little Caesars’ legal team.
This isn’t actually the first time that Little Nero’s Pizza has been available to the public; back in 2015, an UberEats promotion brought the fake brand to the Chicago area. It’s unclear how many lawn ornaments ended up as casualties of the marketing campaign.
But despite these tie-ins’ claims, there’s no real way to get the real Home Alone pizza anymore. According to cinematographer Julio Macat, per Vice, the original film’s pizza dinner (which only cost $122.50) wasn’t some culinary creation of the props department, they were all real pies supplied by Piero’s, a local pizzeria in Wilmette, Illinois. Unfortunately, the restaurant permanently closed in 2019. As for the pile of pizzas that they used in the shot, the crew scarfed down the entire stack.
Kevin eventually gets his very own pizza after a Christmas miracle leads his family to thoughtlessly abandon him. After tricking the pizza delivery guy into thinking that the house is full of murderous gangsters, Kevin tucks into the meal. Originally, the film featured an even more gratuitous shot of the pizza, complete with a puff of steam wafting out of the box when Kevin opened it. The “steam” was really just “a small amount (of fog) from a fogger machine from special effects on the crew,” Macat explained, noting that the old commercial trick helped “to enhance (the pizza’s) awesomeness.”
While that moment didn't make it into the film's final cut, the Home Alone 2 crew used an apparently similar tactic for the unveiling of Kevin’s cheese pizza in the sequel.
That pizza was arguably less appetizing in retrospect, seeing as Rob Schneider's very touch could have tainted the pie.
