Aliens in the Attic: Cast, Box Office & Streaming Facts

Every few months, someone digs “Aliens in the Attic” out of memory and the familiar questions follow: Where is it streaming now? How old were the kids? Did it really flop? The 2009 family adventure, directed by John Schultz, set a clever young cast loose in a Michigan vacation house that was actually shot in New Zealand (fxguide (VFX industry outlet)). Consider this the fact-checked briefing — what the records confirm, what they don’t, and where to watch.

Released: 2009 (IMDb (film database)) ·
Domestic gross: $25.2M (Box Office Watch) ·
Worldwide gross: $59.6M (The Numbers (box-office tracker)) ·
Filmed: Auckland, New Zealand (IMDb (film database))

Eight production and box-office facts, one pattern: the titles, dates, and numbers all trace back to the same stable records, even when the streaming chatter doesn’t.

Where can I watch Aliens in the Attic?

The short answer is that the film doesn’t sit in the big-name subscription row — at least, not in the listings we verified. Apple TV runs a live title page for the movie, and Roku’s what-on section indexes it with cast-and-crew details (Apple TV (streaming storefront); Roku (streaming platform)). The practical route is a digital rental or purchase rather than a catalog click.

Is Aliens in the Attic on Disney Plus?

• Apple TV: the film has a live title page for watch or rent options
• Roku: the title is indexed with cast-and-crew details
• Disney+: no listing found in the storefront pages reviewed

The Disney+ question isn’t unreasonable — it’s simply ahead of the evidence. The storefronts that profit from renting this movie have little reason to keep listing it if a subscription service held exclusive rights in the same market. Their continued listings point toward rental or purchase as the current reality.

Is the movie Aliens in the Attic available on Netflix?

Netflix’s library is region-dependent and changes often, and none of the listings reviewed confirms the film there at the time of research. What we can verify is the film’s current storefront presence on Apple TV and Roku, and that’s the honest boundary of this article’s “where to watch” answer.

The implication: if you want to see the movie this week, the storefront that lists it is the answer. Waiting for a subscription slot means betting on a licensing wheel that no public catalog page can promise.

The pattern: streaming availability is a moving target, but the rental market stays steady for this catalog title.

How old was Austin Butler when he filmed Aliens in the Attic?

Austin Butler’s name in a 2009 cast list tends to stop people cold, because the actor most of us picture from his later career is almost unrecognizable here. The production records place him firmly in the principal cast and the shoot firmly in early 2008, which makes this film a verifiable early-career credit rather than a rumor.

How old, exactly? That calculation needs a birth record, and the film’s paperwork doesn’t publish one. The documented facts are the production window and the casting; the precise age on any given shooting day lives in a biography file, not a movie file.

What condition did Austin Butler have?

The condition most frequently attached to Butler in search queries is alopecia. It’s a personal-health claim that no production record for this film confirms or denies, so it belongs in the “what’s unclear” column of any movie-focused fact-check. The film itself only shows what the camera saw: a young actor in a family comedy, doing exactly what young actors in family comedies do.

The pattern: films that launch young actors inherit their fans’ biographical curiosity, and no amount of production paperwork can settle that curiosity on its own.

How old was Ashley Tisdale in Aliens in the Attic?

Ashley Tisdale was already a recognized name when this cast was assembled, and her spot in the principal cast reflects that, as TCM’s database entry shows. The age question lands in the same place as Butler’s: the film’s production schedule is documented, its cast’s birth certificates are not.

How old was Ricky in Aliens in the Attic?

• Ricky is the boyfriend character, played by Robert Hoffman, who is listed in the film’s principal cast
• The story centers on the kids — Tom, Jake, Bethany, and Hannah — managing the alien threat while keeping the adults, Ricky included, out of the way (Deseret News (Utah daily newspaper))
• No age for the character Ricky appears in the production records reviewed

If the underlying question is Hoffman’s age, the honest answer is the same as for the rest of the cast: it’s a public-biography matter, not a film-record matter.

What this means: “how old was so-and-so in that movie” is usually a roundabout way of asking “was this person a kid or an adult in it?” — and the casting list answers that even when birth records don’t.

Who played the twins in Aliens in the Attic movie?

This one has a clean answer, which is rare in this film’s trivia orbit. The two boys who look like matching bookends in the family chaos are twin actors Henri Young and Regan Young, both credited in the principal cast (TCM (classic-film database)).

What happened to the little girl that played in aliens?

• The little girl in the cast is Ashley Boettcher, credited among the principal performers
• Her role in this film: one of the four kids at the center of the story (Deseret News (Utah daily newspaper))
• What she did after 2009 belongs to her own filmography records, not to this film’s production file

The honest answer to “what happened to her” is that her later work is a separate document from this movie. The film’s cast list confirms the role she played here; her post-2009 projects live in her own biography and filmography pages.

The catch: “whatever happened to…” questions always drag you past the movie’s own records, and that is exactly where the confirmed-facts trail runs out.

What did Ricky take out of his car in Aliens in the Attic?

This is the trivia question that keeps search engines busy, and the honest answer is that none of the production records we reviewed documents the prop, the take, or the scene. What the records do document is the setup: the kids — Tom, Jake, Bethany, and Hannah — spending the movie trying to keep the adults, including the car-driving Ricky, out of the aliens’ way (Deseret News (Utah daily newspaper)).

Why does this land in the “unclear” column? Because a prop in a single shot is the kind of micro-detail that production notes, press kits, and contemporary reviews rarely bother to catalogue. The footage is the only authoritative record.

The pattern: the more specific a trivia question gets, the less likely it is to live in any official document — which is exactly why it becomes a scene to rewatch.

Where did they film Aliens in the Attic?

• Studio location: Albany, Auckland, New Zealand, per IMDb’s production page
• On-screen setting: a vacation house in Michigan, per the fxguide production feature on the film’s visual effects
• Main house: a 1915 villa moved from Remuera to rural North Auckland in 1997 (Wikipedia (community-written production notes))

That last fact is the quietly weird part of the production: a 1915 house, physically relocated more than a decade before the cameras arrived, dressed up to play an American family’s Michigan retreat. Doug Smith, the visual-effects artist cited in the fxguide feature, put the geography simply — shot in Auckland, set in Michigan — and the entire production had to sell that substitution.

The schedule made the geography work harder. Filming reportedly ran from late January to mid-April 2008 on a 30–40 day calendar with no weekend shoots, a compressed rhythm that only makes sense when the main interior is a single house and the main exterior is its yard.

The trade-off: a genuinely old house gives a production instant character, but it also ties every scene to one location’s light, weather, and landscape — which is exactly why the schedule was packed so tight.

Did Aliens in the Attic flop?

If “flop” means failing to turn a theatrical profit, the math is uncomfortable. The Numbers, a dedicated box-office tracker, logged an opening weekend of $8,008,423, a domestic gross of $25,200,412, an international total of $34,350,871, and $59,551,283 worldwide (The Numbers (box-office tracker)).

A crowdsourced budget database, Saturation.io, reports a $45M production budget and, confusingly, a $57.9M box-office total — numbers that don’t reconcile with the tracker data (Saturation.io (budget database)). That conflict is exactly why the budget sits in the “reported” column rather than the confirmed one.

Run the standard theater math: exhibitors keep roughly half of ticket sales, so a film usually needs to gross about double its production budget to break even theatrically. Against a reported $45M budget, the lifetime total lands on the wrong side of that line. So the honest verdict: yes by box-office math, no by catalog longevity. Both statements are true, and the streaming-storefront evidence is the reason they can coexist. “Flop” is a yardstick question — and the yardstick that matters now is the one measuring how often a 17-year-old family film still gets asked about.

The implication: flop and forgotten are not the same; the streaming storefronts prove that.

Aliens in the Attic: the spec sheet

Ten production and distribution specs, one pattern: every number in this table has been stable for years, while the streaming question above refuses to sit still.

What this means: the spec sheet is a reminder that “flop” and “forgotten” are different things — the record here is complete enough to answer almost any factual question except the ones about current licensing.

Aliens in the Attic production timeline

Four dates carry most of the film’s story.

• 1997 — The 1915 villa that anchors the film is moved from Remuera to rural North Auckland; it will become the on-screen Michigan vacation house
• January 28, 2008 – April 18, 2008 — Principal photography runs on a reported 30–40 day schedule with no weekend filming (Wikipedia (community-written production notes))
• 2009 — The film reaches theaters
• August 1, 2009 — Deseret News reviews the film
• Today — Apple TV and Roku both index the title for streaming discovery (Apple TV (streaming storefront); Roku (streaming platform))

The pattern: a short production window, a house older than the production, and a streaming afterlife the theatrical release never predicted.

What’s confirmed vs. what’s still unclear

The fastest way to read this film’s file is to split it into two piles.

The balance is the point: the unverified pile is exactly as full as the confirmed one, which is the honest state of the record for a title that lives mostly in audience memory.

The production, in their own words

Two voices from the record capture the film’s split personality: a location pretending to be another country, and a schedule built around a single house.

“The film was shot in Auckland, New Zealand, but takes place at a vacation house in Michigan.”

— Doug Smith, cited in fxguide (VFX industry outlet)

“Filming will run for 30–40 days from January 28 to April 18, 2008, with no filming on weekends.”

— New Upstairs Productions, via Wikipedia’s production notes

The two quotes line up with everything else in the file: the production was compact, location-bound, and built on the illusion that New Zealand was Michigan.

The pattern: one quote explains the geography, the other explains the pace, and together they explain why the film looks the way it does.

The lasting lesson: a theatrical disappointment can still become a durable favorite. The records agree on the essentials — 2009 release, Auckland shoot, $59.6M lifetime gross — even as the streaming status stays fluid. For Austin Butler completists, Ashley Tisdale fans, and late-2000s family-movie nostalgics, the recommendation is straightforward: rent or buy it on the storefront that lists it today, because catalog rotation can quietly shelve a title for months and leave the “where to watch” answer different by spring.

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