12 Things You May Not Know About Your Favorite Christmas Movies, Part 6

1. After sending the turkey to Bob Catchit’s house, Scrooge grabs the back of a carriage and rides behind it down the street. Many viewers took this to be a reference to director Robert Zemeckis’ previous hit, ‘Back to the Future’. Though Zemeckis said the reference wasn’t intentional, he thinks it was a subconscious connection.

2. Gary Oldman and Lesley Manville, who play Mr. and Mrs. Cratchit, were actually married for three years from 1987 to 1990 and have a son together.

3. According to his autobiography, John Leguizamo was supposed to have a much larger role in the film, but his part was cut to one line which was dubbed over by another actor when filmmakers found out how short he is.

4. In the first film, McClane only had a few scripted one-liners, with the rest ad-libbed by Willis. With the audience response to the first film, more one-liners were written in to this film, and filmmakers gave Willis free reign to ad-lib more as he saw fit.

5. During its original theatrical run, 20^th Century Fox offered a full refund to anyone who didn’t enjoy the movie, with 1,500 tickets eventually refunded.

6. Unlike the original film, in which its Thanksgiving Day parade was a central scene of the story, Macy’s department store refused permission for its name to be used in the remake.

7. In 2001, a US District Court ruled that 20^th Century Fox was guilty of stealing the script idea from a Detroit High School biology teacher and ordered the studio to pay the teacher $19 million, later reduced to $1.5 million. The studio had the decision reversed after proving they received the teacher’s script submission after purchasing another script outline that became the script for ‘Jingle All the Way’.

8. The story was based on the 1980s shopping craze over Cabbage Patch dolls.

9. Director Jonathan Levine said that all of the comedy was mostly improvised and the script, which was more of an outline than a full script, only really featured the dramatic moments.

10. In one scene, Seth Rogen complains about his iPhone saying, “Who invented this piece of s***?!”, referencing his role of Steve Wozniak in ‘Steve Jobs’.

11. Brett Kelly gained more than 40 pounds to reprise his role as Thurman, having slimmed down greatly as he grew up.

12. Lauren Graham was unable to reprise her role of Sue when the Gilmore Girls revival was picked up by Netflix.

Though we covered 'Home Alone' in our original post in this series, this one is too good to not bring up.

A rumored original plot point would have revealed Kevin’s mean and cheap Uncle Frank being the mastermind behind the whole ordeal, tricking Buzz into eating all of Kevin’s pizza so Kevin would get upset and be separated from the family, and also causing the power outage so the family would run late and forget Kevin. The Wet Bandits would have been working for Uncle Frank to steal from his rich brother and kill the nephew he hated and arranged to be left behind. This coincides with the understanding that the role of Uncle Frank was originally intended for a bigger actor, namely Kelsey Grammer.