Tim Burton admits he’s disillusioned with cinema, but it’s been obvious for a while
He’s undoubtedly one of the most famous and distinctive mainstream filmmakers in modern Hollywood, but to cut straight to the chase, when was the last time Tim Burton made a truly great movie?
There are a number of reasonable answers depending entirely on taste and personal preference, but the recurring theme is that none of them have been made recently. Maybe it’s Frankenweenie, which would make sense because it was a passion project adapted from his own short film, which meant that he was always going to give everything to the project.
Perhaps it’s Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, the garish Academy Award-winning gothic musical that oxymoronically kept Burton firmly within his wheelhouse by uniting him with Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter for an off-kilter ode to weirdness and pushed him far outside of it by adding the showstopping numbers of the musical from which it originated.
For some, another winning return to stop-motion in Corpse Bride takes the cake, which remains the last time Burton made a film of any kind that wasn’t adapted from pre-existing source material. For context, the spiritual successor to The Nightmare Before Christmas was released two decades ago, and he’s made eight features since.
Alice in Wonderland may have cleared a billion dollars at the box office, but it was an eyesore that Burton openly admitted he wasn’t sure how to approach, given all the technology required. Dark Shadows should have been a winner based on the auteur’s investment and deep-seated love of the TV show it was based on, only for it to come across as self-indulgence more than anything else.
Big Eyes, meanwhile, was a most welcome detour into a straightforward biographical drama that sheared Burton of his stylistic bells and whistles, and as much as it was a solid change of pace, nobody would rank it among his best works. Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children? Solid yet resoundingly unspectacular, and not successful enough to launch the franchise the studio was obviously eying.
Dumbo was a dreadful enough experience for Burton that it made him state publicly he’d never work with Disney again, even if the end result of rampant mediocrity wasn’t all that surprising, considering he never seemed like the right person to take on the story of the big-eared elephant that takes flight. It’s been an odd period in his career, but a pair of recent developments have been most telling.
For decades, a sequel to Beetlejuice has been stuck firmly in the darkest corner of development hell, only for Burton to finally drag it out and bring it to the screen. It’s been 36 years in the making, but Beetlejuice Beetlejuice might be the perfect tonic to drag the director out of the malaise he’s openly admitted to finding himself in.
“Over the past few years, I got disillusioned with the movie business,” he confessed, per Deadline. “So I knew if I was going to do something, I wanted to do it from my heart. I lost myself a bit, so this movie was re-energizing. Getting back to the things I love and working with the people I love. With this one, it didn’t matter how it turned out. I just enjoyed making it with these people.”
His track record for the last two decades has been patchy at best, and with Beetlejuice Beetlejuice predicted to enjoy a bumper run at the box office, it could turn out to be the perfect movie at the perfect time. He knows the world, he knows the character, and he knows many of the actors very well, and diving into a legacy sequel theoretically offers the chance for Burton to explore the best of both worlds.
The enduring popularity of the original means that it’s going to find a sizeable audience regardless, while the combination of old and new gives him the free rein to make something that’s the epitome of Burtonesque, but also presents the chance to complement that familiarity with freshness, newness, and ingenuity that’s a key part of making any big budget fantasy.
It can’t be a coincidence that at the same time Burton voiced his disillusionment with the big screen, he’s been taking the small one by storm. If there was ever a filmmaker who looked like they’d be perfect for The Addams Family, it’s him. Sure enough, Wednesday became the most-watched TV series in Netflix history, and Beetlejuice Beetlejuice could be the latest chapter in a resurgence the director isn’t shy in admitting he desperately needs.
