15 Most Insultingly Bad Sequels To Great Movies

12. Home Alone 3 (1997), Home Alone 4 (2002) & Home Alone: The Holiday Heist (2012)

By most typical metrics, Home Alone is not a great movie, but it is an incredibly entertaining one, and endures as a holiday classic for good reason. Though the 1992 follow-up might be one of the laziest sequel premises in history, it's still a ton of fun.

The third time, however, was most certainly not the charm. Nor anything else that followed.

By 1997, Macaulay Culkin had well and truly aged out of the Kevin McCallister role, so Home Alone 3 switched him out for the decidedly less charming Alex D. Linz, in a me-too sequel that somehow retained writer John Hughes but not series director Chris Columbus or composer John Williams. It's memorable only for an early appearance by a young Scarlett Johansson.

2002's Home Alone 4 went straight-to-TV and reintroduces the Kevin McCallister as played by a new actor. Everything about it is awful, predictably.

The fifth and final entry to date, 2012's Home Alone: The Holiday Heist, is at least better-shot and generally more tolerable than its predecessor - largely thanks to the presence of Malcolm McDowell and Debi Mazar - but it's still an inexplicable abomination that shouldn't exist.

Please, just let this franchise die.