Macaulay Culkin proved that the true spirit of Christmas is a young child torturing two burglars who invade his home until an old man comes in and beats them over the head with a shovel.

At least that’s the message I got out of Home Alone.

Now that it’s December, it’s once again socially acceptable to watch Christmas movies and Home Alone has got to be one of the best out there, as behind all the violence and gruesome injuries is a lovely message about the importance of family.

Of course Kevin McCallister’s parents can’t have learned that lesson too well the first time around because they forgot him again in the sequel, Home Alone 2: Lost in New York.

While I still prefer the charm of the original, the sequel is still a pretty darn good movie and also counts as a festive film.

While Culkin is better known for the first Home Alone movie he was definitely better paid for the sequel, which once again pitted him against the ‘Wet Bandits’ Harry (Joe Pesci) and Marv (Daniel Stern) as he put them through a series of traps which would have been unambiguously fatal had it not been a charming Christmas movie.

According to The Things, Culkin was paid a handsome sum of $100,000 for his part in the first Home Alone – and remember, that was worth a lot more back in the early 90s than it would be today.

However, since Home Alone made such a stonkingly massive amount of money at the box office that the actors returning for a sequel could command a much higher price.

For Home Alone 2 he was paid somewhere in the region of $4.5 million, a whopping payrise of 4,400 percent, but was worth the money as the movie likewise turned a huge profit.

While he was paid what is a hefty sum for anyone, let alone a kid, to be in the movies Macaulay Culkin doesn’t actually get paid for them nowadays.

Kevin’s raking in the big bucks while he electrocutes a man within an inch of his life (20th Century Fox)

For some actors getting royalties in the contract means they get paid over and over again for the movies they’ve been in, though some of the payments aren’t very much.

Reece Thompson, one of the children in Titanic, revealed he occasionally gets sent money many years after the film released.

Instead of $2 million up front he got $100,000, but the royalties have earned him so much more over his career than he’d have made upfront.