Owning a home is a big deal. And insuring your home is part of the package. If you’re in the market for a new home and low insurance costs are your main concern, avoid living here. From haunted houses to doll houses, we’ve found the eight most insane movie homes that would be impossible to insure.
Bad news, haunted homebuyers: there’s no such thing as ghost insurance. And there’s definitely not an insurance policy to cover your house in case of desecrated burial grounds exacting their revenge. The actual house shown in the films resides at 4267 Roxbury Street in Simi Valley, Calif. The Poltergeist house, however, implodes into an alternate dimension. Caveat emptor, pal: there’s no insurance for that.
The house from the movie Toys is something out of a toy store, only it’s life-sized and Joan Cusack lives in it wearing doll clothes. The large home folds up like a page from a pop-up book. Insuring the lavish house isn’t even the most of Toys‘ problems; the lavish sets, star-studded cast (Robin Williams! LL Cool J!), and René Magritte aesthetic couldn’t save it at the box office — the 1992 film tanked, despite being beautiful and full of heart.
The 1986 film features a million-dollar home that the starring couple (Tom Hanks and Shelley Long) buy for $200,000. Immediately after moving in, they’ve got to deal with collapsing stairs, killer raccoons, and a leaky roof. But there’s more where that came from. The house from The Money Pit is falling apart; it would be impossible to insure it — or live in it! The exterior home shown in the movie isn’t so much a clunker. It’s at 199 Feeks Lane in Locust Valley, N.Y., and there are often families living in (and insuring) it.
The house from Up would be impossible to insure for two reasons: 1) it’s animated, and 2) it flies away. There is, however, a real-life version of the sugary sweet movie’s home — but you have to move to Utah. Homebuilders in Herriman, Utah, got permission from Disney to build a real-life replica of the house from Up at 13215 S. 5390 West, complete with painstaking interior details and balloons on the weekends.
If you’re buying Eddie Murphy’s Haunted Mansion, make sure you double check your home insurance contract — there may be a clause that exempts you from coverage if your house was based on a ride at Disney World. The 2003 spooky comedy (which, by the way, is awful) follows the family of Jim Evers through their adventures at a haunted New Orleans mansion, and is the fifth(!) Disney feature film based solely on a popular park attraction.
Leave it to Robin Williams to make our insane movie list twice. The house from Jumanji is home to lions, monkeys, and killer swamp plants. It becomes the alternate-dimensional vortex of the board game’s hijinks and is virtually destroyed in a stampede. You may not be able to insure the house, but you can watch the full movie here (for this version, it helps if your native language is Georgian):
Homeownership can be its own special kind of hell. And when the ghosts that inhabit your house want you out, it can be a hell of epic proportions. Beetlejuice the “bio-exorcist” creates problems for the homeowners, both living and dead. And when someone rides a sandworm through your house, you’re probably in violation of your policy.
A two-timer on this list, Tim Burton knows how to construct a movie house for impossible insurance. Not only is it an expensive mansion that would be prohibitively expensive for most to insure, Batman‘s Wayne Manor is also full of surprises. Try explaining the Bat Cave to your insurance agent, and don’t expect to get any breaks on your disaster insurance. With all those villains out to get you and your house tricked out to the nines, you’d be lucky to get out alive — insured or not.