Home Alone star Macaulay Culkin has taken holiday cheer in a dark direction, saying his estranged father will probably die alone and that it is what he deserves, just as millions of viewers are revisiting his classic Christmas movies.
According to Deadline, Culkin made the comment while reflecting on his childhood and his life now as a dad, pointing out that his father, Kit Culkin, has seven children and several grandchildren yet is cut off from all of them. “And he’s going to sit there and he’s going to probably die alone and I’m going to go like, yeah, that’s what you deserve,” he said in the recent interview.
A family divided
For longtime fans who remember him as the kid defending his house from burglars, the reality behind the scenes has been painful for decades. Multiple reports note that Culkin has not spoken to his father in roughly 30 years and that none of Kit’s four grandchildren, including Macaulay’s two sons with fiancée Brenda Song, have any relationship with him.
“I wanted nothing to do with my father,” Culkin said earlier in 2025, recalling the custody battle of the 1990s and how he resisted court-ordered visitation with a man he now describes as narcissistic, abusive and “the worst.”
He has alleged that the abuse was both physical and mental and that his father never accepted blame, instead acting as if the children were wrong for pulling away.
When things went wrong
Behind the scenes in the early 1990s, Kit Culkin was not only Macaulay’s father, he was also his manager, steering the career of one of the biggest child stars in the world and, by several accounts, wielding significant control over the family’s finances and professional decisions.
Multiple reports from People, Fox News and other outlets describe a bitter breakdown between Kit and Macaulay’s mother, Patricia Brentrup, including a high-stakes custody fight over their six minor children at the time and a struggle over who would manage Macaulay’s rapidly growing fortune.
During that period, Culkin eventually went to court to remove both parents’ names from his trust and install an independent executor, a move that effectively blocked Kit from direct access to the tens of millions of dollars generated by hits like Home Alone and My Girl and marked the start of a long, public estrangement.
The fallout continues
Culkin has revisited these memories in several 2025 conversations, calling Kit “narcissistic” and “abusive” and saying that by the time his parents split he felt trapped, exhausted and ready to dare a judge to punish him rather than force him back into contact with a man he describes as a bad parent.
As he marks Home Alone’s 35th anniversary and appears at screenings and Q&A events, he has been equally firm that Kit has no place in his present-day family life, stressing that he will not let his father’s “sins” touch his own young sons and that any chance for reconciliation is not on his mind.
I grew up watching Home Alone and still watch it each Christmas to this day. So hearing the now-adult Culkin say his father “deserves” to die alone lands like a Christmas carol suddenly going off key but none of us know the full scale of what went on.
As others in his family have stayed relatively quiet in public, yet Culkin has said that none of Kit’s seven children and four grandchildren keep in touch with him, shows that what may be perceived as a grudge is actually deserved.
Regardless, in an era when celebrity confessions spill out across podcasts, talk shows and streaming specials, this one stands out because of how final it sounds. A middle-aged son stating plainly that there will be no reunion and no late-life heart-to-heart.