It’s the week before Christmas. Trees are adorned with tinsel and bulbs. Mistletoe has been hung in strategic locations. Gingerbread cookies are being baked, decorated and eaten.
And, of course, the Internet is buzzing with cost-analysis calculations over exactly how much money Clark Griswold earned for his annual bonus in National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation.
Glory be a newborn holiday tradition: Figuring out how much classic Christmas movie characters earn and spend.
On Dec. 20, The New York Times ran a story headlined, “Just How Rich Were the McCallisters in ‘Home Alone’?” Reporter Amanda Holpuch invested an extraordinary amount of shoe leather searching for an answer, even consulting with economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago. Basing calculations largely on the cost and mortgage payments of the home in Home Alone — a sizable red-brick colonial in the Chicago suburb of Winnetka, one of the most affluent neighborhoods in the country — the answer the bank’s experts came up with was that the McCallisters pulled in about $305,000 a year in 1990 dollars, or about $665,000 in 2022.
But even before the Times started poking around Kevin’s family’s finances, nosey film fans over on Reddit were putting on green eye shades and calculating exactly how much Clark Griswold was expecting to pocket from his holiday bonus — you know, the one that was supposed to cover the cost of the pool he was planning on installing in his backyard. In a thread started around Dec. 12, scores of National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation aficionados crunched the numbers and came up with a consensus figure of about $20,000 in 1989 money, or about $49,000 today.
“Clark had a direct interaction with the CEO of the company (a company making cereal in Chicago, so maybe Kellogg),” deduced a poster named atlhart. “But the CEO didn’t care enough to remember Clark’s name. So I’d put Clark at Senior Manager or Director level. I’d wager he was making $77-$80k in 1989, so his bonus was probably about 25 percent…. On a $80k salary, a 25% bonus would be $20K.”
A poster called spankadoodle buttressed the argument for Clark’s fat bonus by helpfully adding: “He also made a breakthrough on non-nutritive cereal varnish…mentioned a few times in the film.”
Over at House & Garden, meanwhile, some light was being shed on Keira Knightley’s finances in Love, Actually. A Dec. 15 article reported that the house where Andrew Lincoln’s Mark declared his love for Knightley’s Juliet (by standing at her doorway and flashing a series of oversize cue cards) has come up for rent. The asking price is 2,700 pounds a week, or 10,800 a month, roughly $13,700 in U.S. dollars. Reverse adjusted for inflation, that’s about $8,320 a month in 2003 dollars, which is still a lot of moolah for an interior decorator, which is apparently what Juliet did for a living, at least according to the film’s director.
Of course, when it comes to the greatest Christmas movie of all, there’s very little mystery to how much money was involved. Alan Rickman’s Hans Gruber estimates that the negotiable bearer bonds he’s trying to steal from the safe at the Nakatomi building in 1988’s Die Hard were worth $640 million, or about $1.6 billion today.
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