Sure enough, Jingle All the Way was not as big of a box-office hit as Home Alone, earning just $129 million worldwide compared to Home Alone’s $475 million. Your effort is irrelevant to their pleasure. (Speaking from experience as a father of two, kids don’t care how hard or how easy a toy is to get. So it features a protagonist that children don’t relate to, with goal they wouldn’t have much interest in. While it’s filled with broad physical comedy, the key kid character is barely involved, and the primary focus is instead an exasperated workaholic dad’s increasingly desperate search for this toy. As a result, Jingle All the Way is a strange children’s movie. The main difference between Home Alone and Jingle All the Way is that the former was told from the child’s perspective, with little Macaulay Culkin defending his home from a pair of bumbling burglars, while the latter focuses more on Arnold Schwarzenegger’s father character. The two films also share a key creative figure: Chris Columbus, who directed Home Alone and produced Jingle All the Way.
Jingle All the Way’s combination of Christmas sentiment and grown men getting hit in the groin for laughs was clearly inspired by Home Alone, which opened in theaters a few years earlier and used the same formula to become one of the most financially successful comedies in history.