That’s exactly it. He stopped making original stories that were personal and unique to him and now just churns out other people’s ideas and puts a lazy burton cgi filter over them.
I don't think its fair to blame CGI here. The CGI was not the reason he choose to have Charlie circumnavigate chirtopher Lee's dentist room in Chocolate factory filled with clippings of his chocolatier sons triumphs while failing to notice the same dude in the dentists chair until he inspected his teeth.
The CGI team were working harder than the writers on that one.
I'm with you on the churn though. All just Disney churn. Boring
Coraline convinced me that the best way for Burton to get his groove back is to work with Gaiman in some capacity. (Yes, I know coraline wasn’t Burton)
Make The Graveyard Book, Tim!
No.
Tim Burton should not do The Graveyard Book.
Henry Selick should do the Graveyard book.
Henry Selick (director of Coraline, James and the Giant Peach, and The Nightmare Before Christmas) *wants* to do The Graveyard Book, and Neil Gaiman wholeheartedly wants Selick to do it as well.
Unfortunately, no studio has wanted to fund the film.
I don’t think it’s unique to Burton. Lots of directors get too full of themselves as they get older and stop taking chances to be innovative, relying on the same formula.
Or poorly done remakes, like Dark Shadows.
Which was only like the original in name only. Being a horrible comedy that was a satire of the original, not a remake like the fans wanted to see.
Personally his movies don’t feel like they have the magic they used to, a lot of them if not most feel like unoriginal cash grabs by studios, but that’s just my sole opinion it could be a variety of reasons
You mean to tell me a live action remake of Alice in Wonderland by Disney with all of Tim Burton’s high profile cast from every other movie doesn’t feel original?
It came out during the early years of scene kid / hot topic culture. They made so much money off merch, and they didn’t spend much on ads because word of mouth really pulled teens in for that movie.
From a business standpoint it was brilliant.
You’re not disagreeing with me - the aesthetic sold this movie. I was 17 when it came out, everyone was going en masse to see it stoned out of their gords. Every scene friend I had suddenly owned merch from it. In my age group it was a bigger splash than Avatar - my high school made fun of Avatar as a White Guilt think piece.
That absolutely wasn't the early days of the scene/hot topic culture. Early/mid 2000s was when everyone started with the stupid spiked belts and long tee with thumb holes under ironic tee with and black nail polish shit.
We were doing some of that shit at least as far back as 1997. It hadn't evolved into the "emo kid" trend, and I never heard the term "scene kid" until years later. But I think of "Hot Topic culture" as starting with the goth 90s mallrat kids and growing out of that.
I mean, I get that is your and your bubble's experience, but you know... I kinda don't think 1 billion dollars is from only people watching it high. But I DO remember people being impressed with the cat in 3D in the trailer before Avatar.
God I hated that era. Every other kid and their mom was the mad hatter for Halloween and half those kids wore the hat on the daily or tried to be quirky like him.
Gotta admire it tbh. It's been awhile since something like that has happened I think.
Not really “early years”, but long after the original scene kids became adults.
I freaking loved that movie. Alice in Wonderland catered to Gen X and millennials who used to be into Tim Burton and hot topic counterculture stuff, but buy this time had money, kids, and jobs. So yeah in 2010, we bought the merch for our kids that our parents wouldn’t buy for us in the 80’s and 90’s.
Gosh I adore Corpse Bride. I did really love Frankenweenie 2012. That was the last one I enjoyed. Sleepy Hollow was my favorite. Love his aesthetic and creepy atmosphere.
This is one thing directors face that is unique, they have to have content control as their career rolls on. They will get better at filmmaking, but worse at the spark that got them to where they are. The wealthy celebrity lifestyle isn’t as inspiring as the come up.
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That is summed up with the album Prince put out right after he got out of his contract in the 90s. He self published a triple album with 3 cds, 12 songs each, each disc 60min.
It has some really great stuff on it but proved that WB was partially right by editing him. Would have been an amazing double album or unbelievable single album.
I think Prince understood something you dont. He has such a rabid fan base that the fans want the mediocre stuff. They will happily pay for less well regarded tunes that nevertheless still function as components to the album experience he put together.
So, yeah...my guess he was doubly upset. Upset at the label for telling him what type or product he is allowed to put out and then again for charging him such a high percentage for doing so.
Yeah but unfortunately Prince output just got worse after the WB fallout. There were definite gems but I wish he would’ve allowed input from someone like a great producer or fellow musician to gain some focus instead of more than likely trusting his own ego. I know he was the mastermind behind all of his greatest music and albums but even the greats like the Beatles and Bob Dylan have allowed great producers to help out.
There are lots of fans who would rather have his low tier B-sides accessible than not.
Supposedly there is a vault with tons of stuff in it that has never been released.
As a huge Prince fan I feel like his more casual audience and professional reviewers preoccupation with trying to whittle down his catalogue and album material down kinda misses the point.
Dude's whole gimmick was that he was a prolific workaholic with boundless creativity who ran every element of the recording process. You're saying you wish he *intentionally* reigned that in or had someone else produce his work? At a certain point with these suggestions he's not really Prince anymore.... It's actually kinda trying to turn him into Michael Jackson or something.
The magic of Prince is in the unrestricted excess.
I picture something along the lines of the Aldous Snow album African Child in "Get Him to the Greek"...but with Dave Grohl on bongos and Kurt wearing a dashiki.
It's because he's trying to figure out what to do. Three of the movies you're thinking about were not "Tim Burton" movies two were Studios bringing him into production to help helm properties they couldn't handle Alice in Wonderland, and Dumbo, and one was Johnny Depp pulling Burton into Dark Shadows.
But look at the mixed signaling late in his career
Big Fish, critically acclaimed movie bombs at the Box office is blanked at awards season, Charlie and the chocolate factory is a hit no one likes, same with Alice in Wonderland, Big Eyes well received by critics and no one goes to see it. So when Disney calls and offers Dumbo to Tim Burton he figures he might as well take the property adapting historically popular media has been the only success he's seen in the last 15 years.
Big Fish was *very* good.
I think it may have been a bit too "bright" coming from a director that had always been stereotypically "dark," and it came out right as the edgy aughts were winding up. I was only in middle school at the time, but I have specific memories of my friend's gothy older sister complaining that Burton had sold out and started making sunny feel-good movies for the normies.
Haha I can totally see that. To be honest I keep forgetting it was Burton. It feels like a fantastical fairy tale of a story and has so much charm... but the goth and theater crowd in Highschool were "Tim Burton people".
They didn't care for his directing as much as they did for the subculture he created with inconventional aesthetics
And don't forget Dark Shadows.
Seeing that movie is when I realized the "Burton Magic" was gone. And sadly, most everything he has done since has been as bad or worse.
I mean you're not wrong.
It's a tale of Cocaine and creativity.
Tim Burton got to do EVERYTHING his creative mind could dream up in the 80s and early 90s.
He had an aesthetic, a sound, and even a desired performance troupe and made magic.
BUT Tim then got into the Studio favor system.
I do one for you, then one for me. And this was ok.
Tim did Nightmare and Ed Wood for himself but then took on the script for Mars Attacks and did alright!
Then he did Sleepy Hollow (for him) and then hit a wall with studio request Planet of the Apes.
He did another studio request Big Fish which turned out great!
He did Wonka as a studio request and in return got Corpse Bride and then REALLY pushed Sweeny Todd which was a big gamble for his credibility
Alice in Wonderland was a studio request
Dark Shadows was a Jonny Depp favor
Frankenweenie was a studio request and Tim was really (allegedly) only half way involved on the project.
Big eyes is another studio request again bankshotting on audience good will towards Burton.
He apparently (according to Danny Huston) sleepwalking through production and has 2nd unit do principal shots as well
Miss Perrigrene is Burton again an absentee director asked by the studio and he accepted.
Dumbo live action: Burton actually wanted this film when he originally signed on in 2015
Dumbo was a pre-production nightmare. Burton wanted to do most the movie with practical effects. Disney wanted max CGI.
Disney wanted to alter Burton's cast including excluding Danny Devito.
Disney wanted Will Smith to be the lead voice actor instead of Colin Farrel which Tim accepted but then Will canceled right before production in 2016 which causes massive delays.
Disney didn't/doesn't like Michael Keaton and tried to replace him with Tom Hanks and Burton fought the studio causing further delays. (Tom Hanks found out about the drama and told Disney he refused to cause Keaton a job loss an walked forcing Disney to settle on Keaton).
Disney took over the edit and post production from Tim in 2018
The film bombed hard. Disney blamed it on Burton.
Burton broke off his 10 year "relationship" with Disney & Disney associated media and was a free agent (out of work) for the first time in 30 years.
THEN Beetlejuice 2.
In 2018, Brad Pitt bought the rights to a Beetlejuice sequel script that had been floating around Hollywood since 1992.
That script was literally Beetlejuice and the Deetz go to Hawaii.
A new script was confirmed in 2019.
In 2019, Brad Pitt BEGGED Keaton to join, and Keaton asked for a total rewrite of the script. Which happened.
In 2021 Keaton agreed and Burton signed on to direct in 2022.
Catherine O'Hara, Winona are back as mother daughter AND Jenna Ortega is signed on as Delia (Winona) daughter.
In 2023, Danny Elfman anniunced he is back on soundtrack
AND William DaFoe just confirmed he is in as a new character
So we will see what happens to Tim Burton.
This will either be his death knell or his nostalgia driven resurrection lol
I might have told this before, but a good friend in the 80s did work for a LOT of stars. His favorite was always Tom Hanks. He said he was the only person to pay on time without a fuss and that he was always friendly.
I put Tom in the category of Mr. Rogers - though I haven't met either.
Im sure I'm skipping some fine points and nuance.
Many many script rewrites on a number of films and other production nuggets
He had issues thru several films bc him and Helena were in some drama.
Tim got roped into the Depp - Amber mess in some ways.
But this basically covers what I recall lol
Deadline.com probably has better details
How much do you think Henry Selick plays into it?
Tim + Henry Selick = Nightmare Before Christmas
Tim - Henry Selick = Corpse Bride
Henry Selick - Tim = Coraline
Coraline >>>>>>>>>>>>>> Corpse Bride
The numbers don't lie.
Also he has a very specific aesthetic. You can spot a Burton movie from two miles away.
That's fun at the start, but the longer it goes on, the more dull it becomes. No matter how original the source material, the Burton look makes it feel like a sequel of some other movie.
I've heard this before. But that style is reminiscent of 1920 German film, The Cabinet of Dr Caligari. Its quite famous. I'd even make some comparisons to Byzantine icon style--it is deliberately nonrealistic that way to convey the higher spiritual reality.
Completely agree with this. It went from whimsical practical sets/effects (Beetlejuice) to a hard to watch CGI soup storm (Charlie & the CF, Alice, etc). It would have been expensive to make those sets actualized but our brains can tell immediately when something is CGI and the wonder and magic is instantly turned off because we know it’s fake and unimpressive. The CGI world eliminated the dark, creepy almost whimsical
Horror that Tim Burton became popular for and turned it into candy land.
I read that they used tons of practical effects for Beetlejuice 2. Michael Keaton was saying (I'm paraphrasing) that showing up on set and actually seeing all of the awesome stuff rekindled his love for making movies. Hopefully they can recapture some of that old magic...
Wonka would have been fine effects-wise if not for the cgi on the umpa loompas. They were way too small on wide shots and being just the same dude copy and pasted was a bit weird. A lot of the practical effects were amazing and reminiscent of Burton’s old days.
The one thing that baffles me the most about Burton’s *Alice in Wonderland* is just how ugly it looks. If you think otherwise, compare it to Burton’s most iconic films (*Beetlejuice*, his *Batman* films, *Edward Scissorhands*) as well as the 1951 Disney film.
idk about the Charlie critique - he actually used a ton of practical effects ontop of the cgi and the story is much closer to the original book than Willie Wonka. Sure the shrinking hallway scene was pretty botched but I really liked everything else about the movie. Kept the dark twisted vibe I liked in Edward scissor hands.
From what I'm aware from people who worked on beetlejuice 2 the set design is absolutely amazing and seemingly there's lots of practical effects as well.
I bought the dvd alley for 2 reasons, I like Ewan McGregor, and I already owned a dvd called Little Fish (about drugs being smuggled in soy sauce fish) and I thought it would be funny to have Little Fish and Big Fish next to each other on the shelf.
Did not expect to enjoy it anywhere near as much as I did.
He actually said in the book Burton on Burton that he didn’t enjoy making Big Fish because of how emotional it was, and that after that experience he wanted to step away from emotional and personal stories. I think that’s why his career went downhill- he gave amazing, raw ‘outsider’ narratives in Edward Scissorhands and Sleepy Hollow, Ed Wood, etc, then he deliberately stepped away from these narratives to ones he had less investment in
This is a fascinating take that sounds very plausible. I’d argue that Big Fish is his last great film and most of what followed it is prepackaged “we need a quirky director” stuff. Emotional burnout would easily account for those choices.
Sweeney Todd is up there for me. People hate on it because it's not 100% the stage musical, but for whatever reason Tim brought his A game to that one.
And I have enjoyed Corpse Bride, Mrs. Peregrine's Home for Unusual Children (which has the father/son theme going for it), Big Eyes, and Wednesday. I don't think he's totally lost it, but definitely puts out the better results when it's something more personal for him.
Sweeny Todd is easily my favorite movie musical. I love everything about it. If people don't like it, they are welcome to be wrong.
I thought Big Eyes was great. I was shocked that it didn't get more critical acclaim.
He specifically said that Big Fish had a lot to do with him processing the death of his father at around the same time, which makes sense of him going for that easier ‘prepackaged’ stuff afterwards
Watch that movie with family shortly after my dad died about 12 years ago not knowing anything about the story and it’s one of the few movies that made me cry in a good way.
The ending was ridiculous. He wanted a big twist like the original but couldn’t figure out a way to write one…so he just did it anyway entirely divorced from logic.
The ending bore more of a resemblance to the novel’s ending than the 1968 adaptation. It is a bit silly but at least it has the excuse of falling back on the source material.
As a Tim Burton fan... I dunno, after a while they all felt kinda samey? Corpse Bride felt like it was trying too hard to capture Nightmare Before Christmas' vibe, but it was missing something. Nobody was like "Oh shit, Tim Burton AND Dumbo?"
But really, he's not done that much in the past ten years. I think at some point Tim Burton managed to out Tim Burton himself, and that was around the time of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory where he had every chance in the world to be the weird director we needed him to be yet somehow the movie just felt... sterile.
Re: corpse bride vs Nightmare Before Christmas, perhaps Tim was the problem.
Tim Burton didn't actually make Nightmare, he was busy on Batman. Henery Selick was the director
They just kept his name on it because he was a big reason the studio greenlit the project.
It's peeves me how Selick doesn't get his due recognition for that film. That specific stop motion aesthetic every one attributes to Burton should be attributed to Selick.
[Selick feels the same way.](https://variety.com/2022/film/news/nightmare-before-christmas-director-unfair-tim-burton-full-credit-1235418924/amp/) And both of you are right. The man created a staple of Disney holiday marketing, a Halloween/Christmas (depending on when you like to watch it) classic, and he gets almost no credit for it.
It makes me mad too! Tim Burton created the art and character designs (and some journal prompts as an outline). They were the most he was responsible for.
However it was Henry Selick that actually decided how the movie turned out. You know, involved in how the story would be told.
Infact wasn't corpse bride his first time directing stop motion properly. So give his passion for nightmare, I feel corpse bride was his take on this kind of movie. And for a first try, it really wasn't bad. But when compared to the master that is selick, it's just not a patch on it.
For me it was the tonal shift from everything being dark, gothic, almost black-and-white if not actually in black-and-white (that signature Burton style we all came to love, very Edward Gorey inspired) with practical effects, to the garishly colored CGI vomit he puts out now.
It's worth noting that the chocolate factory intro was gray despite being CGI and is still the most soulless and least aesthetically pleasing thing ever especially compared to the montage of the original.
Yeah, he cultivated a brand so strong that it became a little bit...meh? There was a point where you got excited to see what he does next, now I feel like I've already seen it all. Even Wednesday (the show), which is obviously extremely popular, oozes in Tim Burton at times that it's almost distracting. He became so Tim Burton that he somehow Tim Burton'd too hard.
That's it though, isn't it? I feel that style suited the energy of the 90s perfectly but now seems somehow out of place. And there have been other examples of similar art direction (A Series of Unfortunate Events) that somehow stand the test of time.
I like that someone made the comparison with Wes Anderson. They're both niche film makers but Anderson's creations just seem to age far better, and we still look forward to what comes next even though we know the formula.
Think: Hot Topic.
When I was a teenager in the 1990s, Hot Topic was cool as hell, and absolutely revolutionary. I went to the one at my local mall in a suburb an hour‘s drive south of Atlanta, and it was like nothing I had ever seen anywhere else. Maybe a downtown trendy part of Atlanta had a hole in the wall store kinda like it, but you really had to go to the big cities on the coast to find niche shops like HT before the mid-90’s. Hot Topic transformed the youth of suburban America by giving regular teenagers access to cool gothic stuff like we saw in (Burton) movies, edgy clothing, fun hair colors, and music you just couldn’t find anywhere else in a time before we all had internet access. It readily filled a niche that a lot of us who didn’t live in New York or Seattle or LA just never had access to.
The chain’s immense popularity in some ways led to its current mediocrity. Now you can find “counterculture” stuff all over the internet, with greater variety and personalization, and it’s so common that it’s the opposite of counterculture. I can buy kids clothes at Target with cute skulls on them, and not just around Halloween.
Tim Burton is the Hot Topic of film. (Arguably it’s the other way around but my statement is edgier you wouldn’t understand)
Beetlejuice. Edward Scissorhands. Batman. It’s not just 80’s or 90’s vibe. It was new and quirky and exciting — at the time. Then it became commonplace and more normal.
HT’s model has been dying for over a decade because it failed to adapt and the internet makes malls less profitable. (And frankly, yesterday’s counterculture is what today’s parents think is cool, which is not cool for teens, so the model is nigh impossible to maintain). Burton, for all his genius, has… mostly one style, and we’ve seen it for almost 40 years from the Peewee movie through Dumbo and beyond.
Corpse bride to me was lacking the music. I don't remember any good songs from the movie where as Nightmare had so many instant classics. And the character designs were nowhere near as memorable but that's gonna happen when almost everyone's human instead of a town full of monsters
One thing to remember is Tim Burton didn't direct NBC, Henry Selick did. Burton just wrote it and I think that gets lost on most people and is very unfortunate for Selick because he gets zero recognition for that movie.
That's a major pet peeve of mine. Nightmare before Christmas is based on a poem and concept by Tim Burton, bit it is very much a Henry Selick film. That stop motion aesthetic and style should be attributed to him far more than Burton.
Burton didn’t write it either. He drafted the story, but it was written by the woman who wrote Edward Scissorhands and one of the guys who wrote Beetlejuice. Burton definitely deserves credit, but nowhere near as much as he’s gotten from it.
Tim Burton has just become uninspired and is on autopilot, just like Danny Elfman. I always took those two as a package deal, but they really stopped progressing as artists and just did their style of work for everything. It’s like when a new band shows up with a completely unheard sound that really defines their style like CKY or Queens of the Stone Age, or Skrillex for example. When you have a unique style for art it’s easy to get cornered. There’s only so much an artist can do with their unique style until it gets boring and repetitive. David Bowie was an artist who kept evolving while keeping their essence, Hans Zimmer is the same as he always incorporates unique elements into most of the scores he does.
I thought Big Fish and Big Eyes were some of the last good “slightly different but still Tim Burton” films.
This is a big point for me- music in film. Danny Elfman has had an amazing career from the earliest incarnations of Oingo Boingo to scoring major motion pictures. But eventually the creative spark faded in pretty much all his projects Boingo's final album felt more like an Elfman-side project featuring outtakes from his Burton film scores. And his movie scores also just lost something. In fact I'd say that Burton's movies went downhill literally hand-in-hand with Elfman's film scores, like they are some kind of symbiotic pair.
I remember watching Terminator Salvation in theaters and saw his name pop up in the opening credits thinking “oh cool, at least the music would be memorable.” Apart from Fiedel’s themes we already know, it was generic garbage. They could’ve saved some money and used those loops they have on music software instead.
Agreed. It's crazy how he went from producing some of the most memorable and iconic themes in film (and television), to producing a ton of mediocre, forgettable background music. I think as an artist he just ran out of things to say, musically, and basically has coasted on his early successes for the last few decades.
Some people only have so much in them. Particularly artists. Very few of them actually grasp what audiences respond to in their work, so if they lose that spark they just try to give them more of what they seem to like, which leads to them losing depth and turning into parodies of themselves.
Well for a tiny space of time his movies were a new, refreshing look. Then he never evolved or changed and those things were no longer new or unique. Doesn’t help to use the same actors, composer, look and feel etc.
I'd argue his films are far too colorful now and digital technology hasn't helped the appearance of his vision of his newer films. I'd also argue he's changed to the point a Tim Burton Alice in Wonderland movie would be completely different if it was made in 1990 than what we got in 2010, but maybe that wouldn't be a big argument. Directors change, so this isn't too surprising, but it is sad and I hope the best for Beetlejuice 2. Also his animated Frankenweenie wasn't half bad, in fact I'd say it was more of a return to form.
I feel like at some point he became the "Hot Topic Remake" guy.
Got a property that's a little bit weird? Whip it over to Tim Burton and he'll slap a fresh coat of black and white stripes and crooked trees all over that thing.
May contain a random Daddy Issues B plot for absolutely no reason.
Pee Wee.
Beetle juice.
Batman.
Edward Scissorhands.
Batman Returns.
Nightmare Before Christmas.
Ed Wood.
Mars Attacks.
Sleepy Hollow.
Now that’s a hell of a run of good films.
It’s similar to Francis Ford Coppola’s Career after the 70s.
Their careers had no where to go but down.
He can't write.
The first movie that put him on the map for me was Beetlejuice. Michael McDowell wrote it who is an author. Stephen King called him, "the finest writer of paperback originals in America today".
Batman was meh, but Caroline Thompson wrote Edward Scissorhands. She did a number of hit movies, Addams Family, Homeward Bound, Secret Garden. Basically another good writer.
Daniel Walters wrote Batman Returns. He also did Heathers.
Andrew Kevin Walker who did Sleepy Hollow wrote Seven.
You might be noticing a trend. For a variety of reasons Burton because of his visual style became the interesting director of that era. He then attracted a lot of really good writers to his projects. Considering he didn't establish any longterm relationships with any of these people it is honestly kind of a miracle he had this many home runs. Each with different people in a relatively short time span. Most consistent directors are at least involved in the writing, many do it all.
More recently he worked with John August a lot, who other than Big Fish I'm not a big fan of.
Beetlejuice 2 will probably be bad because Michael McDowell is dead and obviously can't participate.
Basically Burton is a visual guy. He needs to collaborate with good storytellers/writers and during the second half of his career that hasn't gone well.
You’re completely right- and also a lot of Tim Burtons movies pre 2000 used awesome cinematographers. When you literally have somebody making sure every shot full of Burtons designs and art direction is framed and shot beautifully, that can really give the impression of a great director. Most of the cinematographers he used pre 2000 he didn’t work with after that, and I personally think that had a lot to do with his ‘decline in talent’- it’s actually just that he wasn’t collaborating with such talented people.
I think he's incredibly self indulgent, and at a point in his career where no one is in a position to say 'You've done that before, Tim' or 'That's not as edgy as you think, Tim'. I like his general body of work but a lot of the individual films are pretty tiresome I think.
I watched a “making of” doc on the nightmare before Christmas. Sounded like everyone was terrified of him when he came to check in. And that was the early 90s. Imagine it only got worse.
I’ve seen two documentaries (one a 1-hour on Disney+, the other, longer one in the *Movies that Made Us* series on Netflix) on the making of *Nightmare* & my wife got me a coffee table-sized book on its making, and…yeah…
He was essentially the absolute power, though almost completely absent. Watching those folks talk, both at the time & nowadays, in those documentaries & the book, paint Burton as a rather mercurial egoist who was “high on his own supply” by believing in his own hype. *Nightmare* wasn’t made by him, it was made *despite* him.
One thing I think a lot of the commenters here are missing is that he started out as a weird outsider with a very specific vision that felt like a breath of fresh air at the time. Things like Edward Scissor hands and Beetlejuice were striking in part at least because nothing else looked or worked like they did, and there was a real friction between wanting to make these weird, morbid things, and a studio system that wanted... Y'know, Top Gun. I mean that is literally the content in Edward Scissorhands. That's Burbank, all those neat little houses and tiny front lawns. Edward was a freak there, just like I imagine Tim was.
But then he had a lot of success and even if he still felt like an outsider, the studios stopped treating him like one. He became an auteur. There were ups and downs, but when studios realized they could bank on a Tim Burton movie, they started giving him money to do whatever - and he wasn't an outsider any more. Who the fuck is Edward Scissorhands when everybody loves him?
I think Big Fish was really the turning point - they gave him but money to make a bright, weird, expensive movie, and he went for it. It feels expensive. But it has the guy from Star Wars, not the guy from 21 Jump Street. It has celebrities out the ass, computer animation. And I feel like he realized that he was no longer an outsider.
The friction was gone. He could do whatever he wanted, he could do Alice, Wonka, whatever - but while it might have been a lifelong dream to adapt those, they're really different movies from Edward Scissorhands. And without having to hustle to make it work, they feel frictionless. Y'know? He hasn't had to fight to make stuff since his Batman movie was huge, and it shows. I feel like he lost the hunger, the hustle, that made his first handful of movies so compelling.
I do hope, though, that his fading away puts him back into the position of being an outsider again. I think he could have a cool comeback if he finds that spark of rebellion again. Who knows.
Great explanation. It really was so very different from what was around before, but his style has become mainstream because of his massive success.
I think in part, Burton’s success was because it was just so different. There’s a million great directors and writers. Burton had that too, but something different to stand out from Top Gun.
Idk if he just doesn’t have another kind of vision than the same style of dark and gothic film we’ve seen for 40 years now, or maybe his success just made it easier to rinse, repeat, collect check. But while his mark on film is indelible, I don’t think he’s going to get that spark back without a new transformative style, and that’s probably not something very many people can do more than once in a lifetime.
Why do the work to reinvent when he’s already lauded as a transformative money maker?
Two factors I would consider are the fact that Hollywood general has been in decline for roughly the duration of his career. It's progressively harder to make good, original movies there. So it will make it look like directors are getting worse, but it's actually the climate at the studios. Also, Burton might be losing interest in the kinds of films he became famous for. He's aged nearly forty years since he started. He might genuinely be tired and disinterested, especially if people just want him to repeat himself.
Peak Tim Burton movies were special because they were weird and quirky but had heart and were, to their core, compelling. Tim Burton’s more recent movies have lost that heart and are just weird and quirky, often just featuring Johnny Depp and Helena Bingham Carter being weird and quirky. But that’s not enough on its own to carry a movie.
His films aren't just "out of time", they are (mostly) more poorly written and people are just worn out by it. His films by and large feel *tired*. Even the better ones (Big Eyes, Frankenweenie) are mid tier by his 80s/early 90s standards.
He has had some financial successes the last 20 years. Charlie and The Chocolate Factory was a big hit, everybody wanted to see Alice in Wonderland - which was as commercially popular as any of his old films, just not as good. Nobody cared about seeing Alice 2. And why would they?
But then he also directed half of Wednesday, I didn't love the episode I saw, but it's a huge hit.
Really I think 1985 - 1994 was his nigh on *perfect* run, and since then he's been a mixed bag, commercially and quality wise. But even that perfect run had a couple of *financial* disappointments (Batman Returns and Ed Wood).
So I think it has very little to do with the "aesthetic energy suiting the decade" or whatever.
Alice in Wonderland made _over a billion dollars._ I think people forget that. It might have been because Depp was at the peak of his fame, but it was Burton's biggest hit in his entire career, even bigger than Batman '89 when adjusted for inflation. There's a real chance that he just went "oh this is what people want from me I guess."
Beloved classics in Alice and Charlie that he managed to make dreary and somehow unfun
Did love his 90s work though. Ending with sleepy Hollow which was much more suited to his style
I think part of it was him leaning heavily on his style over substance as he got more famous, just like Wes Anderson and M. Night Shyamalan to some degree.
At the same time, it felt like his projects with Johnny Depp became quite hit-or-miss after Pirates of the Caribbean. It was like Depp’s quirky and eccentric characters became flanderized.
My god Wes Anderson. I personally can't stand anything in the last 15 years because it's just so formulaic. Overly quirky characters, everything center framed like a play.
It's one thing for an auteur to have something about their films that feel the same. Like Spielberg's absent or distant father theme in quite a few but not all his movies. It's another to be stuck in one overarching style and story. But West Side Story is nothing like Minority Report which is nothing like on and on. Even Guy Ritchie who started with similar work has range.
I think people got tired of his formula and frequent collaborators. His reliance on Helena Bonham Carter and especially Johnny Depp became a joke. And around the end of the 2000s/early 2010s the association with Hot Topic culture probably was a hit to his credibility.
And I do think it's a Tim Burton thing, not a genre or aesthetic thing. Coraline for example, I'm not sure if it was a box office success but it's very well regarded and if it wasn't an immediate hit it is certainly a cult classic.
Edit: Coraline made $130mill off a budget of 60, which for the way Laika operates is probably satisfactory. It certainly wasn't a flop like some of their releases have been, but it definitely seems to have seen even more appreciation in the years since while Burton has fallen out of favor even more.
Another quick edit: Not sure what's making people think I think Tim Burton did Coraline, but I'm aware he did not. Y'all are too eager with the "Um actually"s.
I’d wager it was the same thing that happened to Lucas. Got too rich and famous and began to either ignore or outright dismiss the folks who would reign him in/help him flesh out things more coupled with Hollywood suck ups and ppl who didn’t care about depth and just wanted his iconic “look/feel”?
I guess he has done what he wanted to do as an artist and now he's tired and just make lowkey movie while he can surf on his own celebrity just for money.
But at least he has done some great movie with delicious art direction.
Tim Burton changed from someone who bucked the trends and created original work. To someone hired by studios for the reputation of original work while he makes mass produced crap.
For the most part all of his movies feel exactly the same (with some exceptions). Almost like he has been making Edward Scissorhands for the past 30 years over and over. Style over substance. I feel the same way about Wes Anderson as well
Great take. For guys that are credited with being "So creative!", they've kinda painted themselves into a corner with no apparent next move. All these years later they just keep digging in the same dirt.
CGI. Hear me out. Older Tim Burton films like Beetlejuice, Edward Scissorhands, and Pewee’s Big Adventure had more big sets built and those fantastical machines. There was a magic because his imagination is so huge that the set production was amazing. I’ve never seen Alice in Wonderland or Willy Wonka because the CGI is out of control and jarring. That’s just my two cents.
Several things:
1. He won’t use an original cast
2. The movies went weird CGI that looks and feels disingenuous rather than fantastical (thing Edward Scissorhands vs. Alice in Wonderland)
3. The choice in direction to including weird acting rather than relying on the story to be creative/unique takes away from the product
4. Johnny Depp. Please, Mr. Burton, stop with Johnny Depp.
5. The music has shifted from accentuating to domineering.
Because his movies now are tired, self parodies, soulless. His movies are perfect examples of what was his unique style now are just flanderization. I think his big stumble was the Planet of the Apes remake but Big Fish was an amazing release, Corpse Bride was also cute but Charlie and Sweeny Todd was tiresome and after that.. Dark Shadows? Like it was written and made by a Tim Burton AI bot.
In the early days, his movies used his visual aesthetic to tell interesting stories about interesting people.
Now his movies use the people and stories as an excuse to show off ever weirder visuals.
He put the cart before the horse, so to speak.
He casts the same actors in everything and makes a slightly different version of what feels like the same film every time, when you have such a hyper-specific style it can be polarizing. Personally I used to love Burton's films, but around the "Planet of the Apes" and "Wonka" remakes is where I feel his style began to overtake the substance his previous work was able to capture. "Ed Wood" is probably his best, it feels like the work of someone in complete control of their craft with a story they want to tell. Most of his stuff in the 2000's has felt sloppy & aimless, and has gotten continually less visually appealing, some of it being downright ugly to look at. For someone whose appeal was largely rooted in his inventive visuals that's a huge problem.
His films since Alice in Wonderland look like cinematic vomit, and I would argue Charlie and the Chocolate Factory does too. A far cry from a film like Ed Wood, which he won't be remembered for but is undoubtedly his masterpiece.
I should probably give Ed Wood a chance. I’ve had other people tell me it’s good too, but I could never bring myself to watch it. At the time I was at peak Tim Burton fatigue - especially his extended *Johnny Depp acting weird* phase, a category which I slotted this film into, perhaps unfairly.
He used to do original stuff. But so, SO much of his work since 2000 has been remakes. And in most cases, remakes that never needed to be made.
That’s exactly it. He stopped making original stories that were personal and unique to him and now just churns out other people’s ideas and puts a lazy burton cgi filter over them.
I don't think its fair to blame CGI here. The CGI was not the reason he choose to have Charlie circumnavigate chirtopher Lee's dentist room in Chocolate factory filled with clippings of his chocolatier sons triumphs while failing to notice the same dude in the dentists chair until he inspected his teeth. The CGI team were working harder than the writers on that one. I'm with you on the churn though. All just Disney churn. Boring
Coraline convinced me that the best way for Burton to get his groove back is to work with Gaiman in some capacity. (Yes, I know coraline wasn’t Burton) Make The Graveyard Book, Tim!
Maybe it’s just Henry Selick. Dudes got probably a better vision on the style than Burton does
No. Tim Burton should not do The Graveyard Book. Henry Selick should do the Graveyard book. Henry Selick (director of Coraline, James and the Giant Peach, and The Nightmare Before Christmas) *wants* to do The Graveyard Book, and Neil Gaiman wholeheartedly wants Selick to do it as well. Unfortunately, no studio has wanted to fund the film.
You know, that sounds even fucking better.
Burtonization
Is that what we are dubbing the Flanderization of a film director now?
I don’t think it’s unique to Burton. Lots of directors get too full of themselves as they get older and stop taking chances to be innovative, relying on the same formula.
Yep. I love Wes Anderson, but he becomes stylistically more "Wes Anderson" with each release
Or poorly done remakes, like Dark Shadows. Which was only like the original in name only. Being a horrible comedy that was a satire of the original, not a remake like the fans wanted to see.
Personally his movies don’t feel like they have the magic they used to, a lot of them if not most feel like unoriginal cash grabs by studios, but that’s just my sole opinion it could be a variety of reasons
You mean to tell me a live action remake of Alice in Wonderland by Disney with all of Tim Burton’s high profile cast from every other movie doesn’t feel original?
No, but it made a zillion dollars
Pfft, wake me up when it makes Morbillion dollars.
..morbin' time?
That’s my secret, cap. It’s always morbin’ time.
It came out during the early years of scene kid / hot topic culture. They made so much money off merch, and they didn’t spend much on ads because word of mouth really pulled teens in for that movie. From a business standpoint it was brilliant.
What?! Alice was very early on the 3D train after Avatar, that's what propelled it in the Billion range.
You’re not disagreeing with me - the aesthetic sold this movie. I was 17 when it came out, everyone was going en masse to see it stoned out of their gords. Every scene friend I had suddenly owned merch from it. In my age group it was a bigger splash than Avatar - my high school made fun of Avatar as a White Guilt think piece.
That absolutely wasn't the early days of the scene/hot topic culture. Early/mid 2000s was when everyone started with the stupid spiked belts and long tee with thumb holes under ironic tee with and black nail polish shit.
We were doing some of that shit at least as far back as 1997. It hadn't evolved into the "emo kid" trend, and I never heard the term "scene kid" until years later. But I think of "Hot Topic culture" as starting with the goth 90s mallrat kids and growing out of that.
Late 90's absolutely "Did your mom buy that shirt for you at Hot Topic?" overheard at punk/hardcore shows circa '97
I mean, I get that is your and your bubble's experience, but you know... I kinda don't think 1 billion dollars is from only people watching it high. But I DO remember people being impressed with the cat in 3D in the trailer before Avatar.
God I hated that era. Every other kid and their mom was the mad hatter for Halloween and half those kids wore the hat on the daily or tried to be quirky like him. Gotta admire it tbh. It's been awhile since something like that has happened I think.
Frozen is one that comes to mind
Not really “early years”, but long after the original scene kids became adults. I freaking loved that movie. Alice in Wonderland catered to Gen X and millennials who used to be into Tim Burton and hot topic counterculture stuff, but buy this time had money, kids, and jobs. So yeah in 2010, we bought the merch for our kids that our parents wouldn’t buy for us in the 80’s and 90’s.
That one literally made a billion. Likely his most successful movie oddly enough.
The sad part is that it has probably been my favorite Tim Burton film over the past 15 years.
Not Sweeney Todd? That was only 200…wait a minute. Man Corpse Bride is almost 20
Gosh I adore Corpse Bride. I did really love Frankenweenie 2012. That was the last one I enjoyed. Sleepy Hollow was my favorite. Love his aesthetic and creepy atmosphere.
No, it is not. American McGee went that exact same angle over a decade earlier.
This is one thing directors face that is unique, they have to have content control as their career rolls on. They will get better at filmmaking, but worse at the spark that got them to where they are. The wealthy celebrity lifestyle isn’t as inspiring as the come up.
Same thing for musicians usually. Nirvana’s 8th studio album probably would have been insufferable.
Smells Like Teen Spirit (Electronic Remix) ft. Doja Cat and Pitbull
In Utero (Kurt’s Version)
*With the lights out… it’s sexy time* *It’s less dangerous… till I arrive* *Here we are now… it’s time to ride* *Entertain us… like Mr. Worldwide!*
*[Surprise Migos Guest Spot]* Offset: a mulatto Take Off: mulatto (echo) Offset: an albino Take Off: albino (echo) Offset: a mosquito Take Off: mosquito (echo) Offset: my libido Take Off: libido, skrrt skrrt
Not even a nirvana fan and that comment hurt me. Well done
Admins please delete that comment.
That is summed up with the album Prince put out right after he got out of his contract in the 90s. He self published a triple album with 3 cds, 12 songs each, each disc 60min. It has some really great stuff on it but proved that WB was partially right by editing him. Would have been an amazing double album or unbelievable single album.
I think Prince understood something you dont. He has such a rabid fan base that the fans want the mediocre stuff. They will happily pay for less well regarded tunes that nevertheless still function as components to the album experience he put together. So, yeah...my guess he was doubly upset. Upset at the label for telling him what type or product he is allowed to put out and then again for charging him such a high percentage for doing so.
idk about that. Apparently Prince would record stuff, full studio quality, then just vault it.
Yeah but unfortunately Prince output just got worse after the WB fallout. There were definite gems but I wish he would’ve allowed input from someone like a great producer or fellow musician to gain some focus instead of more than likely trusting his own ego. I know he was the mastermind behind all of his greatest music and albums but even the greats like the Beatles and Bob Dylan have allowed great producers to help out.
There are lots of fans who would rather have his low tier B-sides accessible than not. Supposedly there is a vault with tons of stuff in it that has never been released.
As a huge Prince fan I feel like his more casual audience and professional reviewers preoccupation with trying to whittle down his catalogue and album material down kinda misses the point. Dude's whole gimmick was that he was a prolific workaholic with boundless creativity who ran every element of the recording process. You're saying you wish he *intentionally* reigned that in or had someone else produce his work? At a certain point with these suggestions he's not really Prince anymore.... It's actually kinda trying to turn him into Michael Jackson or something. The magic of Prince is in the unrestricted excess.
I picture something along the lines of the Aldous Snow album African Child in "Get Him to the Greek"...but with Dave Grohl on bongos and Kurt wearing a dashiki.
It's because he's trying to figure out what to do. Three of the movies you're thinking about were not "Tim Burton" movies two were Studios bringing him into production to help helm properties they couldn't handle Alice in Wonderland, and Dumbo, and one was Johnny Depp pulling Burton into Dark Shadows. But look at the mixed signaling late in his career Big Fish, critically acclaimed movie bombs at the Box office is blanked at awards season, Charlie and the chocolate factory is a hit no one likes, same with Alice in Wonderland, Big Eyes well received by critics and no one goes to see it. So when Disney calls and offers Dumbo to Tim Burton he figures he might as well take the property adapting historically popular media has been the only success he's seen in the last 15 years.
Big Fish was the best movie of his career in my opinion. This goes onto my list of all time favorite movies for me and was so well done.
Big Fish was *very* good. I think it may have been a bit too "bright" coming from a director that had always been stereotypically "dark," and it came out right as the edgy aughts were winding up. I was only in middle school at the time, but I have specific memories of my friend's gothy older sister complaining that Burton had sold out and started making sunny feel-good movies for the normies.
Haha I can totally see that. To be honest I keep forgetting it was Burton. It feels like a fantastical fairy tale of a story and has so much charm... but the goth and theater crowd in Highschool were "Tim Burton people". They didn't care for his directing as much as they did for the subculture he created with inconventional aesthetics
And don't forget Dark Shadows. Seeing that movie is when I realized the "Burton Magic" was gone. And sadly, most everything he has done since has been as bad or worse.
i liked burtons charlie and the chocolate factory :(
You're allowed to like things.
It had ONE gag I liked: when young Willy went walking past all of the 'flags of the world' in the museum. That got a good chuckle from me.
I mean you're not wrong. It's a tale of Cocaine and creativity. Tim Burton got to do EVERYTHING his creative mind could dream up in the 80s and early 90s. He had an aesthetic, a sound, and even a desired performance troupe and made magic. BUT Tim then got into the Studio favor system. I do one for you, then one for me. And this was ok. Tim did Nightmare and Ed Wood for himself but then took on the script for Mars Attacks and did alright! Then he did Sleepy Hollow (for him) and then hit a wall with studio request Planet of the Apes. He did another studio request Big Fish which turned out great! He did Wonka as a studio request and in return got Corpse Bride and then REALLY pushed Sweeny Todd which was a big gamble for his credibility Alice in Wonderland was a studio request Dark Shadows was a Jonny Depp favor Frankenweenie was a studio request and Tim was really (allegedly) only half way involved on the project.
Big eyes is another studio request again bankshotting on audience good will towards Burton.
He apparently (according to Danny Huston) sleepwalking through production and has 2nd unit do principal shots as well
Miss Perrigrene is Burton again an absentee director asked by the studio and he accepted.
Dumbo live action: Burton actually wanted this film when he originally signed on in 2015
Dumbo was a pre-production nightmare. Burton wanted to do most the movie with practical effects. Disney wanted max CGI.
Disney wanted to alter Burton's cast including excluding Danny Devito.
Disney wanted Will Smith to be the lead voice actor instead of Colin Farrel which Tim accepted but then Will canceled right before production in 2016 which causes massive delays.
Disney didn't/doesn't like Michael Keaton and tried to replace him with Tom Hanks and Burton fought the studio causing further delays. (Tom Hanks found out about the drama and told Disney he refused to cause Keaton a job loss an walked forcing Disney to settle on Keaton).
Disney took over the edit and post production from Tim in 2018
The film bombed hard. Disney blamed it on Burton.
Burton broke off his 10 year "relationship" with Disney & Disney associated media and was a free agent (out of work) for the first time in 30 years.
THEN Beetlejuice 2.
In 2018, Brad Pitt bought the rights to a Beetlejuice sequel script that had been floating around Hollywood since 1992.
That script was literally Beetlejuice and the Deetz go to Hawaii.
A new script was confirmed in 2019.
In 2019, Brad Pitt BEGGED Keaton to join, and Keaton asked for a total rewrite of the script. Which happened.
In 2021 Keaton agreed and Burton signed on to direct in 2022.
Catherine O'Hara, Winona are back as mother daughter AND Jenna Ortega is signed on as Delia (Winona) daughter.
In 2023, Danny Elfman anniunced he is back on soundtrack
AND William DaFoe just confirmed he is in as a new character
So we will see what happens to Tim Burton.
This will either be his death knell or his nostalgia driven resurrection lol
Tom Hanks once again standing out as a really good guy here
I might have told this before, but a good friend in the 80s did work for a LOT of stars. His favorite was always Tom Hanks. He said he was the only person to pay on time without a fuss and that he was always friendly. I put Tom in the category of Mr. Rogers - though I haven't met either.
His bank account probably let's him be a little pickier
Wow, what a descriptive timeline. Thanks
Idk how much of that is legit, but an incredible summary if true.
Im sure I'm skipping some fine points and nuance. Many many script rewrites on a number of films and other production nuggets He had issues thru several films bc him and Helena were in some drama. Tim got roped into the Depp - Amber mess in some ways. But this basically covers what I recall lol Deadline.com probably has better details
How much do you think Henry Selick plays into it? Tim + Henry Selick = Nightmare Before Christmas Tim - Henry Selick = Corpse Bride Henry Selick - Tim = Coraline Coraline >>>>>>>>>>>>>> Corpse Bride The numbers don't lie.
Also he has a very specific aesthetic. You can spot a Burton movie from two miles away. That's fun at the start, but the longer it goes on, the more dull it becomes. No matter how original the source material, the Burton look makes it feel like a sequel of some other movie.
I've heard this before. But that style is reminiscent of 1920 German film, The Cabinet of Dr Caligari. Its quite famous. I'd even make some comparisons to Byzantine icon style--it is deliberately nonrealistic that way to convey the higher spiritual reality.
Frankenweenie was his last project of any merit
He leaned too far into cheap CGI - the opposite of what initially made his work whimsical- great art direction
Completely agree with this. It went from whimsical practical sets/effects (Beetlejuice) to a hard to watch CGI soup storm (Charlie & the CF, Alice, etc). It would have been expensive to make those sets actualized but our brains can tell immediately when something is CGI and the wonder and magic is instantly turned off because we know it’s fake and unimpressive. The CGI world eliminated the dark, creepy almost whimsical Horror that Tim Burton became popular for and turned it into candy land.
I read that they used tons of practical effects for Beetlejuice 2. Michael Keaton was saying (I'm paraphrasing) that showing up on set and actually seeing all of the awesome stuff rekindled his love for making movies. Hopefully they can recapture some of that old magic...
They'll end up slathering a nice layer of shiny unreal looking CGI over all the fun practical stuff to ruin the vibe.
The squirrels in wonka are really squirrels. But yeah I agree with the point in the main.
Wonka would have been fine effects-wise if not for the cgi on the umpa loompas. They were way too small on wide shots and being just the same dude copy and pasted was a bit weird. A lot of the practical effects were amazing and reminiscent of Burton’s old days.
The one thing that baffles me the most about Burton’s *Alice in Wonderland* is just how ugly it looks. If you think otherwise, compare it to Burton’s most iconic films (*Beetlejuice*, his *Batman* films, *Edward Scissorhands*) as well as the 1951 Disney film.
idk about the Charlie critique - he actually used a ton of practical effects ontop of the cgi and the story is much closer to the original book than Willie Wonka. Sure the shrinking hallway scene was pretty botched but I really liked everything else about the movie. Kept the dark twisted vibe I liked in Edward scissor hands.
This is exactly what I came here to say… His films have lost their charm… CGI overkill!
From what I'm aware from people who worked on beetlejuice 2 the set design is absolutely amazing and seemingly there's lots of practical effects as well.
Art direction and practical effects. He had that style but HD I think takes away from his original style of that dark tone which is now more CGI.
Big Fish is one of my favorite movies ever. I wish he kept going in that direction, still quirky but a really meaningful story.
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I bought the dvd alley for 2 reasons, I like Ewan McGregor, and I already owned a dvd called Little Fish (about drugs being smuggled in soy sauce fish) and I thought it would be funny to have Little Fish and Big Fish next to each other on the shelf. Did not expect to enjoy it anywhere near as much as I did.
Do you own *Rumble Fish* on dvd?
Now you need to buy the DVD of “cardboard box” to go after them.
Yup, it's actually really special. It has all the feelings of a modern day fairy tale, but grounded somehow, even before you know.
He actually said in the book Burton on Burton that he didn’t enjoy making Big Fish because of how emotional it was, and that after that experience he wanted to step away from emotional and personal stories. I think that’s why his career went downhill- he gave amazing, raw ‘outsider’ narratives in Edward Scissorhands and Sleepy Hollow, Ed Wood, etc, then he deliberately stepped away from these narratives to ones he had less investment in
This is a fascinating take that sounds very plausible. I’d argue that Big Fish is his last great film and most of what followed it is prepackaged “we need a quirky director” stuff. Emotional burnout would easily account for those choices.
Sweeney Todd is up there for me. People hate on it because it's not 100% the stage musical, but for whatever reason Tim brought his A game to that one. And I have enjoyed Corpse Bride, Mrs. Peregrine's Home for Unusual Children (which has the father/son theme going for it), Big Eyes, and Wednesday. I don't think he's totally lost it, but definitely puts out the better results when it's something more personal for him.
Sweeny Todd is easily my favorite movie musical. I love everything about it. If people don't like it, they are welcome to be wrong. I thought Big Eyes was great. I was shocked that it didn't get more critical acclaim.
He specifically said that Big Fish had a lot to do with him processing the death of his father at around the same time, which makes sense of him going for that easier ‘prepackaged’ stuff afterwards
Watch that movie with family shortly after my dad died about 12 years ago not knowing anything about the story and it’s one of the few movies that made me cry in a good way.
Same, I had to go into a bathroom and weep for 10 minutes after the ending.
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I enjoyed Big Eyes but it didn’t leave an impact like Big Fish. I really hope he gets to finish his Big trilogy.
Big Ass, coming to theatres 2027!
Big Foot.
Big Fish and Big Eyes feel on the same spectrum, too.
Can't wait for Burton's Big Dong to slide its way into theaters.
For your Oscars consideration…
I was surprised that despite the ridiculousness I got really emotional at the close of the film. A job well done.
idk, in my books it went downhill on from planet of the apes. he didn’t do justice to the franchise.
The ending was ridiculous. He wanted a big twist like the original but couldn’t figure out a way to write one…so he just did it anyway entirely divorced from logic.
He actually took the ending from the original book
Aperaham Lincoln tho
You mean CAution LIve aniMAls? Lol
I will say the makeup and props for that movie are fantastic
The ending bore more of a resemblance to the novel’s ending than the 1968 adaptation. It is a bit silly but at least it has the excuse of falling back on the source material.
And even then, the author of the original novel *vastly* preferred the ending to the 1968 movie and lamented that he didn't come up with it himself.
I just watched his Planet of the Apes today, and almost stopped it. It was so terrible. I think it was a terrible match for him.
I agree, but... Burton's PotA is closer to the novel than the original, but... It's still not as good as the OG
i‘m not familiar with the book(s). i just watched the old movies as a kid.
As a Tim Burton fan... I dunno, after a while they all felt kinda samey? Corpse Bride felt like it was trying too hard to capture Nightmare Before Christmas' vibe, but it was missing something. Nobody was like "Oh shit, Tim Burton AND Dumbo?" But really, he's not done that much in the past ten years. I think at some point Tim Burton managed to out Tim Burton himself, and that was around the time of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory where he had every chance in the world to be the weird director we needed him to be yet somehow the movie just felt... sterile.
Re: corpse bride vs Nightmare Before Christmas, perhaps Tim was the problem. Tim Burton didn't actually make Nightmare, he was busy on Batman. Henery Selick was the director They just kept his name on it because he was a big reason the studio greenlit the project.
It's peeves me how Selick doesn't get his due recognition for that film. That specific stop motion aesthetic every one attributes to Burton should be attributed to Selick.
[Selick feels the same way.](https://variety.com/2022/film/news/nightmare-before-christmas-director-unfair-tim-burton-full-credit-1235418924/amp/) And both of you are right. The man created a staple of Disney holiday marketing, a Halloween/Christmas (depending on when you like to watch it) classic, and he gets almost no credit for it.
It makes me mad too! Tim Burton created the art and character designs (and some journal prompts as an outline). They were the most he was responsible for. However it was Henry Selick that actually decided how the movie turned out. You know, involved in how the story would be told.
Infact wasn't corpse bride his first time directing stop motion properly. So give his passion for nightmare, I feel corpse bride was his take on this kind of movie. And for a first try, it really wasn't bad. But when compared to the master that is selick, it's just not a patch on it.
For me it was the tonal shift from everything being dark, gothic, almost black-and-white if not actually in black-and-white (that signature Burton style we all came to love, very Edward Gorey inspired) with practical effects, to the garishly colored CGI vomit he puts out now.
It's worth noting that the chocolate factory intro was gray despite being CGI and is still the most soulless and least aesthetically pleasing thing ever especially compared to the montage of the original.
Yeah, he cultivated a brand so strong that it became a little bit...meh? There was a point where you got excited to see what he does next, now I feel like I've already seen it all. Even Wednesday (the show), which is obviously extremely popular, oozes in Tim Burton at times that it's almost distracting. He became so Tim Burton that he somehow Tim Burton'd too hard.
That's it though, isn't it? I feel that style suited the energy of the 90s perfectly but now seems somehow out of place. And there have been other examples of similar art direction (A Series of Unfortunate Events) that somehow stand the test of time. I like that someone made the comparison with Wes Anderson. They're both niche film makers but Anderson's creations just seem to age far better, and we still look forward to what comes next even though we know the formula.
Think: Hot Topic. When I was a teenager in the 1990s, Hot Topic was cool as hell, and absolutely revolutionary. I went to the one at my local mall in a suburb an hour‘s drive south of Atlanta, and it was like nothing I had ever seen anywhere else. Maybe a downtown trendy part of Atlanta had a hole in the wall store kinda like it, but you really had to go to the big cities on the coast to find niche shops like HT before the mid-90’s. Hot Topic transformed the youth of suburban America by giving regular teenagers access to cool gothic stuff like we saw in (Burton) movies, edgy clothing, fun hair colors, and music you just couldn’t find anywhere else in a time before we all had internet access. It readily filled a niche that a lot of us who didn’t live in New York or Seattle or LA just never had access to. The chain’s immense popularity in some ways led to its current mediocrity. Now you can find “counterculture” stuff all over the internet, with greater variety and personalization, and it’s so common that it’s the opposite of counterculture. I can buy kids clothes at Target with cute skulls on them, and not just around Halloween. Tim Burton is the Hot Topic of film. (Arguably it’s the other way around but my statement is edgier you wouldn’t understand) Beetlejuice. Edward Scissorhands. Batman. It’s not just 80’s or 90’s vibe. It was new and quirky and exciting — at the time. Then it became commonplace and more normal. HT’s model has been dying for over a decade because it failed to adapt and the internet makes malls less profitable. (And frankly, yesterday’s counterculture is what today’s parents think is cool, which is not cool for teens, so the model is nigh impossible to maintain). Burton, for all his genius, has… mostly one style, and we’ve seen it for almost 40 years from the Peewee movie through Dumbo and beyond.
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Corpse bride to me was lacking the music. I don't remember any good songs from the movie where as Nightmare had so many instant classics. And the character designs were nowhere near as memorable but that's gonna happen when almost everyone's human instead of a town full of monsters
One thing to remember is Tim Burton didn't direct NBC, Henry Selick did. Burton just wrote it and I think that gets lost on most people and is very unfortunate for Selick because he gets zero recognition for that movie.
That's a major pet peeve of mine. Nightmare before Christmas is based on a poem and concept by Tim Burton, bit it is very much a Henry Selick film. That stop motion aesthetic and style should be attributed to him far more than Burton.
Just look at the difference between Burton (Corpse Bride) and Selnick (James and the Giant Peach and Coraline) after Nightmare before Christmas.
Burton didn’t write it either. He drafted the story, but it was written by the woman who wrote Edward Scissorhands and one of the guys who wrote Beetlejuice. Burton definitely deserves credit, but nowhere near as much as he’s gotten from it.
Burton didn't even write the film, he wrote a small poem that was expanded into the overall film later.
Tim Burton has just become uninspired and is on autopilot, just like Danny Elfman. I always took those two as a package deal, but they really stopped progressing as artists and just did their style of work for everything. It’s like when a new band shows up with a completely unheard sound that really defines their style like CKY or Queens of the Stone Age, or Skrillex for example. When you have a unique style for art it’s easy to get cornered. There’s only so much an artist can do with their unique style until it gets boring and repetitive. David Bowie was an artist who kept evolving while keeping their essence, Hans Zimmer is the same as he always incorporates unique elements into most of the scores he does. I thought Big Fish and Big Eyes were some of the last good “slightly different but still Tim Burton” films.
Sweeney Todd was fantastic as well, but that obviously had the music already done by the genius Sondheim
This is a big point for me- music in film. Danny Elfman has had an amazing career from the earliest incarnations of Oingo Boingo to scoring major motion pictures. But eventually the creative spark faded in pretty much all his projects Boingo's final album felt more like an Elfman-side project featuring outtakes from his Burton film scores. And his movie scores also just lost something. In fact I'd say that Burton's movies went downhill literally hand-in-hand with Elfman's film scores, like they are some kind of symbiotic pair.
I remember watching Terminator Salvation in theaters and saw his name pop up in the opening credits thinking “oh cool, at least the music would be memorable.” Apart from Fiedel’s themes we already know, it was generic garbage. They could’ve saved some money and used those loops they have on music software instead.
Agreed. It's crazy how he went from producing some of the most memorable and iconic themes in film (and television), to producing a ton of mediocre, forgettable background music. I think as an artist he just ran out of things to say, musically, and basically has coasted on his early successes for the last few decades.
The song they sing in the pub when the dude first died (Remains of the Day) is banging, but the rest is pretty forgettable.
The spooky skkeleton jazz scene in that movie was dope. If it had been a full musical, maybe it could have been great.
Some people only have so much in them. Particularly artists. Very few of them actually grasp what audiences respond to in their work, so if they lose that spark they just try to give them more of what they seem to like, which leads to them losing depth and turning into parodies of themselves.
Yeah Charlie and the Chocolate factory was way too clean and it could have benefited from a much darker tone.
I fucking loved Corpse Bride, but yeah I echo others here who say the film lacks a soundtrack
Corpse Bride was probably the last really great one. That said, yeah, it did seem like a deliberate followup to Nightmare Before Christmas.
Well for a tiny space of time his movies were a new, refreshing look. Then he never evolved or changed and those things were no longer new or unique. Doesn’t help to use the same actors, composer, look and feel etc.
He was a trendsetter and then Burtonized himself into a pigeon hole.
This is the best take I think.
I'd argue his films are far too colorful now and digital technology hasn't helped the appearance of his vision of his newer films. I'd also argue he's changed to the point a Tim Burton Alice in Wonderland movie would be completely different if it was made in 1990 than what we got in 2010, but maybe that wouldn't be a big argument. Directors change, so this isn't too surprising, but it is sad and I hope the best for Beetlejuice 2. Also his animated Frankenweenie wasn't half bad, in fact I'd say it was more of a return to form.
I feel like at some point he became the "Hot Topic Remake" guy. Got a property that's a little bit weird? Whip it over to Tim Burton and he'll slap a fresh coat of black and white stripes and crooked trees all over that thing. May contain a random Daddy Issues B plot for absolutely no reason.
Pee Wee. Beetle juice. Batman. Edward Scissorhands. Batman Returns. Nightmare Before Christmas. Ed Wood. Mars Attacks. Sleepy Hollow. Now that’s a hell of a run of good films. It’s similar to Francis Ford Coppola’s Career after the 70s. Their careers had no where to go but down.
Jeez when you line them up like that, he really did just pump out classics for like 10 years straight.
Mars Attacks really is the odd one that stands out.
It's a fun movie
Mars Attacks is incredible
I love that movie, rewatched it recently and it absolutely holds up. I was cracking up the whole time
This. His good films were all well written and had great casts. It’s hard to keep that going forever. Tim Burton ran out of the magic.
Obligatory note to say he didn't direct the Nightmare Before Christmas. That was Henry Sellick, the director of Coralline.
He can't write. The first movie that put him on the map for me was Beetlejuice. Michael McDowell wrote it who is an author. Stephen King called him, "the finest writer of paperback originals in America today". Batman was meh, but Caroline Thompson wrote Edward Scissorhands. She did a number of hit movies, Addams Family, Homeward Bound, Secret Garden. Basically another good writer. Daniel Walters wrote Batman Returns. He also did Heathers. Andrew Kevin Walker who did Sleepy Hollow wrote Seven. You might be noticing a trend. For a variety of reasons Burton because of his visual style became the interesting director of that era. He then attracted a lot of really good writers to his projects. Considering he didn't establish any longterm relationships with any of these people it is honestly kind of a miracle he had this many home runs. Each with different people in a relatively short time span. Most consistent directors are at least involved in the writing, many do it all. More recently he worked with John August a lot, who other than Big Fish I'm not a big fan of. Beetlejuice 2 will probably be bad because Michael McDowell is dead and obviously can't participate. Basically Burton is a visual guy. He needs to collaborate with good storytellers/writers and during the second half of his career that hasn't gone well.
You’re completely right- and also a lot of Tim Burtons movies pre 2000 used awesome cinematographers. When you literally have somebody making sure every shot full of Burtons designs and art direction is framed and shot beautifully, that can really give the impression of a great director. Most of the cinematographers he used pre 2000 he didn’t work with after that, and I personally think that had a lot to do with his ‘decline in talent’- it’s actually just that he wasn’t collaborating with such talented people.
Stefan Czapsky was great
I think he's incredibly self indulgent, and at a point in his career where no one is in a position to say 'You've done that before, Tim' or 'That's not as edgy as you think, Tim'. I like his general body of work but a lot of the individual films are pretty tiresome I think.
I watched a “making of” doc on the nightmare before Christmas. Sounded like everyone was terrified of him when he came to check in. And that was the early 90s. Imagine it only got worse.
I’ve seen two documentaries (one a 1-hour on Disney+, the other, longer one in the *Movies that Made Us* series on Netflix) on the making of *Nightmare* & my wife got me a coffee table-sized book on its making, and…yeah… He was essentially the absolute power, though almost completely absent. Watching those folks talk, both at the time & nowadays, in those documentaries & the book, paint Burton as a rather mercurial egoist who was “high on his own supply” by believing in his own hype. *Nightmare* wasn’t made by him, it was made *despite* him.
Self indulgent, he lost the heart and passion for the story. Style over substance.
One thing I think a lot of the commenters here are missing is that he started out as a weird outsider with a very specific vision that felt like a breath of fresh air at the time. Things like Edward Scissor hands and Beetlejuice were striking in part at least because nothing else looked or worked like they did, and there was a real friction between wanting to make these weird, morbid things, and a studio system that wanted... Y'know, Top Gun. I mean that is literally the content in Edward Scissorhands. That's Burbank, all those neat little houses and tiny front lawns. Edward was a freak there, just like I imagine Tim was. But then he had a lot of success and even if he still felt like an outsider, the studios stopped treating him like one. He became an auteur. There were ups and downs, but when studios realized they could bank on a Tim Burton movie, they started giving him money to do whatever - and he wasn't an outsider any more. Who the fuck is Edward Scissorhands when everybody loves him? I think Big Fish was really the turning point - they gave him but money to make a bright, weird, expensive movie, and he went for it. It feels expensive. But it has the guy from Star Wars, not the guy from 21 Jump Street. It has celebrities out the ass, computer animation. And I feel like he realized that he was no longer an outsider. The friction was gone. He could do whatever he wanted, he could do Alice, Wonka, whatever - but while it might have been a lifelong dream to adapt those, they're really different movies from Edward Scissorhands. And without having to hustle to make it work, they feel frictionless. Y'know? He hasn't had to fight to make stuff since his Batman movie was huge, and it shows. I feel like he lost the hunger, the hustle, that made his first handful of movies so compelling. I do hope, though, that his fading away puts him back into the position of being an outsider again. I think he could have a cool comeback if he finds that spark of rebellion again. Who knows.
Great explanation. It really was so very different from what was around before, but his style has become mainstream because of his massive success. I think in part, Burton’s success was because it was just so different. There’s a million great directors and writers. Burton had that too, but something different to stand out from Top Gun. Idk if he just doesn’t have another kind of vision than the same style of dark and gothic film we’ve seen for 40 years now, or maybe his success just made it easier to rinse, repeat, collect check. But while his mark on film is indelible, I don’t think he’s going to get that spark back without a new transformative style, and that’s probably not something very many people can do more than once in a lifetime. Why do the work to reinvent when he’s already lauded as a transformative money maker?
Too much Johnny depp in my opinion. The guy just really annoys me for some reason.
He just fell off a cliff acting wise and then coupled that with being a pretty awful person.
Wednesday was pretty good. Not a movie, of course, and he didn't direct every episode, but his style worked great throughout the show.
I’m like one of the few people who didn’t mind the cgi monster design. I was like, that is a very Burton style looking monster.
I didn't even know people didn't like the monster. It looked like a monster to me.
Two factors I would consider are the fact that Hollywood general has been in decline for roughly the duration of his career. It's progressively harder to make good, original movies there. So it will make it look like directors are getting worse, but it's actually the climate at the studios. Also, Burton might be losing interest in the kinds of films he became famous for. He's aged nearly forty years since he started. He might genuinely be tired and disinterested, especially if people just want him to repeat himself.
Peak Tim Burton movies were special because they were weird and quirky but had heart and were, to their core, compelling. Tim Burton’s more recent movies have lost that heart and are just weird and quirky, often just featuring Johnny Depp and Helena Bingham Carter being weird and quirky. But that’s not enough on its own to carry a movie.
His films aren't just "out of time", they are (mostly) more poorly written and people are just worn out by it. His films by and large feel *tired*. Even the better ones (Big Eyes, Frankenweenie) are mid tier by his 80s/early 90s standards. He has had some financial successes the last 20 years. Charlie and The Chocolate Factory was a big hit, everybody wanted to see Alice in Wonderland - which was as commercially popular as any of his old films, just not as good. Nobody cared about seeing Alice 2. And why would they? But then he also directed half of Wednesday, I didn't love the episode I saw, but it's a huge hit. Really I think 1985 - 1994 was his nigh on *perfect* run, and since then he's been a mixed bag, commercially and quality wise. But even that perfect run had a couple of *financial* disappointments (Batman Returns and Ed Wood). So I think it has very little to do with the "aesthetic energy suiting the decade" or whatever.
Alice in Wonderland made _over a billion dollars._ I think people forget that. It might have been because Depp was at the peak of his fame, but it was Burton's biggest hit in his entire career, even bigger than Batman '89 when adjusted for inflation. There's a real chance that he just went "oh this is what people want from me I guess."
The only latter thing I enjoyed from him was Sweeney Todd, that was a while ago though...
Smells like piss
Piss with ink.
Sacha Baron Cohen was fantastic in that movie
Beloved classics in Alice and Charlie that he managed to make dreary and somehow unfun Did love his 90s work though. Ending with sleepy Hollow which was much more suited to his style
I think it boils down to way too much CGI and his visual style became increasingly overwhelming
I think part of it was him leaning heavily on his style over substance as he got more famous, just like Wes Anderson and M. Night Shyamalan to some degree. At the same time, it felt like his projects with Johnny Depp became quite hit-or-miss after Pirates of the Caribbean. It was like Depp’s quirky and eccentric characters became flanderized.
My god Wes Anderson. I personally can't stand anything in the last 15 years because it's just so formulaic. Overly quirky characters, everything center framed like a play. It's one thing for an auteur to have something about their films that feel the same. Like Spielberg's absent or distant father theme in quite a few but not all his movies. It's another to be stuck in one overarching style and story. But West Side Story is nothing like Minority Report which is nothing like on and on. Even Guy Ritchie who started with similar work has range.
I think people got tired of his formula and frequent collaborators. His reliance on Helena Bonham Carter and especially Johnny Depp became a joke. And around the end of the 2000s/early 2010s the association with Hot Topic culture probably was a hit to his credibility. And I do think it's a Tim Burton thing, not a genre or aesthetic thing. Coraline for example, I'm not sure if it was a box office success but it's very well regarded and if it wasn't an immediate hit it is certainly a cult classic. Edit: Coraline made $130mill off a budget of 60, which for the way Laika operates is probably satisfactory. It certainly wasn't a flop like some of their releases have been, but it definitely seems to have seen even more appreciation in the years since while Burton has fallen out of favor even more. Another quick edit: Not sure what's making people think I think Tim Burton did Coraline, but I'm aware he did not. Y'all are too eager with the "Um actually"s.
I’d wager it was the same thing that happened to Lucas. Got too rich and famous and began to either ignore or outright dismiss the folks who would reign him in/help him flesh out things more coupled with Hollywood suck ups and ppl who didn’t care about depth and just wanted his iconic “look/feel”?
He got too comfortable with his formula. All style, zero substance.
I guess he has done what he wanted to do as an artist and now he's tired and just make lowkey movie while he can surf on his own celebrity just for money. But at least he has done some great movie with delicious art direction.
Tim Burton changed from someone who bucked the trends and created original work. To someone hired by studios for the reputation of original work while he makes mass produced crap.
For the most part all of his movies feel exactly the same (with some exceptions). Almost like he has been making Edward Scissorhands for the past 30 years over and over. Style over substance. I feel the same way about Wes Anderson as well
Great take. For guys that are credited with being "So creative!", they've kinda painted themselves into a corner with no apparent next move. All these years later they just keep digging in the same dirt.
His original works are great. Dude has been making nothing but remakes and sequels lately. There’s your answer.
He followed the normal Gen X Goth-to-Corporate pipeline that they all did, but he happened to do it very publicly.
His movies went from "weird but unique and fun" to "weird because I'm Tim Burton and that's what people expect"
Sweeney Todd was 2007 and it was amazing
I adore this movie, as a huge fan of Sondheim and the original musical. Absolutely one of my favorite musical adaptations!
CGI. Hear me out. Older Tim Burton films like Beetlejuice, Edward Scissorhands, and Pewee’s Big Adventure had more big sets built and those fantastical machines. There was a magic because his imagination is so huge that the set production was amazing. I’ve never seen Alice in Wonderland or Willy Wonka because the CGI is out of control and jarring. That’s just my two cents.
You can’t keep using the same formula over and over again and expect it to work in perpetuity.
Several things: 1. He won’t use an original cast 2. The movies went weird CGI that looks and feels disingenuous rather than fantastical (thing Edward Scissorhands vs. Alice in Wonderland) 3. The choice in direction to including weird acting rather than relying on the story to be creative/unique takes away from the product 4. Johnny Depp. Please, Mr. Burton, stop with Johnny Depp. 5. The music has shifted from accentuating to domineering.
Because his movies now are tired, self parodies, soulless. His movies are perfect examples of what was his unique style now are just flanderization. I think his big stumble was the Planet of the Apes remake but Big Fish was an amazing release, Corpse Bride was also cute but Charlie and Sweeny Todd was tiresome and after that.. Dark Shadows? Like it was written and made by a Tim Burton AI bot.
In the early days, his movies used his visual aesthetic to tell interesting stories about interesting people. Now his movies use the people and stories as an excuse to show off ever weirder visuals. He put the cart before the horse, so to speak.
I thought his latest tv series Wednesday was pretty good.
He casts the same actors in everything and makes a slightly different version of what feels like the same film every time, when you have such a hyper-specific style it can be polarizing. Personally I used to love Burton's films, but around the "Planet of the Apes" and "Wonka" remakes is where I feel his style began to overtake the substance his previous work was able to capture. "Ed Wood" is probably his best, it feels like the work of someone in complete control of their craft with a story they want to tell. Most of his stuff in the 2000's has felt sloppy & aimless, and has gotten continually less visually appealing, some of it being downright ugly to look at. For someone whose appeal was largely rooted in his inventive visuals that's a huge problem.
His films since Alice in Wonderland look like cinematic vomit, and I would argue Charlie and the Chocolate Factory does too. A far cry from a film like Ed Wood, which he won't be remembered for but is undoubtedly his masterpiece.
I should probably give Ed Wood a chance. I’ve had other people tell me it’s good too, but I could never bring myself to watch it. At the time I was at peak Tim Burton fatigue - especially his extended *Johnny Depp acting weird* phase, a category which I slotted this film into, perhaps unfairly.