Over the course of a 40-year career, Hollywood’s resident weirdo director has gone from pushing the envelope to resorting to retreads, all while watching his counterculture oddness become mainstream. If we say his name three times, will he finally come back?
“A small but significant relief.”
“A return to joy.”
These are just two of the early reviews greeting Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, Tim Burton’s new sequel to the 1988 horror comedy that was his second feature film. After two decades of diminishing returns for cinema’s once most-beloved outsider, the auteur behind such beloved films as Edward Scissorhands and Batman seems to be returning to his roots. The albatross of his own once-brilliant aesthetic, dinged in recent years by critical duds like Alice in Wonderland or Dark Shadows, seems to weigh less heavily these days for the filmmaker. Lapsed Burtonites may even feel a bizarre sense of optimism for his latest project, stoked further by the director’s own admission that filming the sequel “reinvigorated [his] love of making movies.”
“I felt like I was sinking into my own grave,” Burton told the British Film Institute in a 2023 interview about the Beetlejuice sequel, confirming that sense of a loss of an inventive spark. Indeed, somewhere in his 40-plus-year career, Burton went from a masterful visual stylist and champion of the outsider to That Hot Topic Guy Who Makes Movies About Pale Weirdos. Die-hard fans became disillusioned as the twisted became tedious. And through the combination of a shifting industry fueled by nostalgia and the creative complacency of Burton himself, it became difficult to remember what drew audiences to his macabre brilliance in the first place.
Those good old days bring to mind a decade-long miracle run of critical and box office successes, from Pee-wee’s Big Adventure to Beetlejuice to Batman, from Edward Scissorhands to Batman Returns to Ed Wood, with The Nightmare Before Christmas (which Burton conceived) thrown in for good measure. These are films that captured audiences’ imaginations with their signature mixture of black comedy, expressionistic design, and outsider protagonists.
Yet by the dawn of the 21st century, the worm began to turn. In 2001, he made Planet of the Apes, a no-good, very bad film that’s one exceptional Paul Giamatti performance and some stellar makeup work by Rick Baker away from being completely unwatchable. Worse, it feels impossible to locate within Apes any sense of Burton’s personal touch. Gone are the striking scenic flourishes and “strange and unusual” central performances; in their place, a generic jungle soundstage and Mark Wahlberg. Following that film, it’s impossible to deny that Burton’s work began cruising on a sort of generic weirdness. His inspiration seemed to be flagging, his choices of projects a game of Creative Mad Libs—“What if Tim Burton did Planet of the Apes?” “How about Willy Wonka?”—and the results became more and more middling, with Burton’s reason for taking on the projects in the first place more and more perfunctory. (Regarding Apes, “I was affected by the original film.” Charlie and the Chocolate Factory? “I’ve always liked that.”)
By the time Johnny Depp was caking on his fifth round of white clown makeup for Alice in Wonderland (sixth if you count his vocal performance in Corpse Bride), it didn’t seem ridiculous to wonder whether the black-and-white-pinstriped snake wasn’t devouring its own tail. And just as the punk-rock counterculture iconography of Michelle Pfeiffer’s ’90s Catwoman and Depp’s Scissorhands gradually became more and more mainstream (read: deeply uncool), just as Jack Skellington became a staple on the shelves at CVS for Halloween, despite the character’s Hamlet-esque existential malaise, Burton the Innovator became Burton the Brand.
Exactly who should bear the blame for this transition is a nuanced question. Surely a bit of it must be placed on Disney, which, after firing Burton as a concept artist in 1984 for not fitting into the mold, spent the next two decades watching his aesthetic grow in mainstream potential, and then when it got a chance, it pounced. In 2007, the House of Mouse brought him back into the fold to helm Alice, a movie which, to put it bluntly, feels like someone vomiting the idea of “Tim Burton” onto a screen for two hours. The Mad Hatter is pale! Alice is moody! Johnny Depp performs a CGI-assisted monstrosity of a dance called “The Futterwacken,” which frankly should have led to the jailing of all involved! The next project Burton helmed for Disney was 2012’s Frankenweenie, a perfectly agreeable, if safe and uninspired, animated remake of the 1984 short film that led to his firing after the studio deemed it too dark for children.
Repackaging the old and rebellious into the safe and consumer-friendly has long been Disney’s modus operandi. Fighting for artistic individuality has become a bit of a losing battle against a studio that finds a way of homogenizing everything, from Marvel comic books to Star Wars to its very own animated classics. For the Disney machine, flattening the aesthetic of a once-inspired auteur to fit it into the company’s house style was a small price to pay to add “From the twisted mind of Tim Burton” as an arm of the company’s branding.
But if that’s true, then audiences also bear a bit of the blame by making Alice in Wonderland Burton’s highest-grossing film ever. Raking in over a billion dollars, the movie more than doubled Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Burton’s second-biggest earner, and the effect was a cultural rubber-stamping of this kind of Burton homogenization, a message of “More of this, please, no matter the quality.” Combine that with the middling audience response to his riskier, artistic offerings (Ed Wood, Big Fish), and one can begin to see why he might retreat into a later career of retreading his greatest hits.
Industry-wise, Alice was even honored with two Academy Awards, tied for the most trophies one of his films ever managed to win (Ed Wood also went home with two, for supporting actor and makeup and hairstyling, while Alice’s were for costume design and art direction). Burton has never been honored by his peers with even a nomination for Best Director, despite being one of the most iconic filmmakers of the past 40 years, nor has a single one of his films been nominated for Best Picture. Not Edward Scissorhands, not Ed Wood, not even Big Fish, an uneven but often enchanting (and undeniably Academy-friendly) bit of Southern Gothic fantasy with a five-hanky wallop of an ending that was roundly rejected by the Oscars nine years after they showered trophies on the similar but inferior Forrest Gump. Fish was also Burton’s way of processing the emotions associated with his father’s recent passing, making the Academy’s rejection of the film personal.
Since then, Burton hasn’t bared his soul to an audience quite like that again. To that end, some of the blame must be piled on the filmmaker himself. If the latter part of his career is indeed akin to him “sinking into his grave,” it takes a certain complacency to embrace that descent, to stop fighting against the rejection, and to accept that one has nothing more to offer audiences than retreads of what came before. Burton’s Disney output manifested further degradations of the kind of “Burton takes on X” exercises that gave us Apes and Charlie; 2012’s Dark Shadows and 2016’s Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children play like whimsy-less cannibalizations of the earlier, greater films that put him on the map. Even with Big Eyes, his only “adult” film of the 2010s, it can be hard to find the personal tether that drew Burton to the material. If his past several outings have made audiences wonder what they even liked about Burton in the first place, then it’s chiefly his fault for failing to remind them of that je ne sais quoi that created such a strong bond between the public and his work to begin with. It was never just the pale weirdos and the “twisted” aesthetics; the allure of Burton went far beyond the pasty-faced iconography of Johnny Depp as the Mad Hatter, beyond the Jack Skellington hoodies hanging in every goth kid’s closet across the nation—back to the inspiration of a pale, gangly boy with a shock of black hair growing up in sunny Burbank, California.
It’s de rigueur to note the striking resemblance between young Burton and many of his future protagonists: Edward Scissorhands, of course, but also Victor Van Dort in Corpse Bride and Ichabod Crane in Sleepy Hollow. His first avatar, however, can be seen in his premiere short, Vincent, a 1982 six-minute black-and-white stop-motion animated film produced during his time at Disney about a tortured 7-year-old boy operating under the delusion that he’s a mad scientist haunted by the memory of his dead wife. The resemblance is of course a physical one: the long white face, the wild mane of black hair. But the real kinship between Burton and young Vincent goes beyond aesthetics. Boiled down to its essence, Vincent is about a boy doomed to his own tortured artistry, whose mom just wants him to go outside and play. That’s not only an apt metaphor for an animator who would rather doodle macabre visions of pale, pinched faces and woeful saucer eyes than the cheerful foxes and hounds his Disney overlords were paying him for; it’s also the universal sentiment of the Young Outsider. Burton was already creating a direct line to the hearts of every young person who didn’t fit in, the ones who’d prefer a solitary day consuming or making art than playing outside with the “normal” kids; the moody Edward Scissorhandses roaming the bright and cheerful suburbs of the world.
That primal, personal sentiment—that genuine empathy for the other—permeates all of Burton’s early films. It’s evident in Edward Scissorhands, of course, but also in Beetlejuice’s Lydia Deetz, Nightmare Before Christmas’s Jack Skellington, and in perhaps the filmmaker’s masterpiece, the eponymous Ed Wood, the infamous “worst director who ever lived,” whom Burton frames not as a hack, but as a virtuosic artist attempting to make his Citizen Kane independently of Hollywood.
Even Burton’s Batman films are focused less on action than they are on exploring the loner weirdos who exist on the periphery of our society. Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight may be widely regarded as the Great Superhero Film, but Burton’s Batman Returns is the more interesting movie, precisely for the way in which it eschews familiar action beats for a psychological study of what causes a person to put on a mask and live in the shadows, from Catwoman to the Penguin to Batman himself.
In nearly all of these films, the strangest character is the one who has Burton’s sympathies, and indeed the one he’s arguing is the most normal. The regular ones—the suburban neighbors of Scissorhands who gossip over the phone and at the neighborhood barbecues, the Deetzes of Beetlejuice who host dinner parties to curry favor with potential business partners—these are the real freaks. That’s a thesis statement that’s always going to ring true to a certain outsider spirit in people, and combined with Burton’s mastery as a visual stylist, it’s no wonder his early films captured the zeitgeist. Jack Skellington and Edward Scissorhands didn’t just become Halloween costume staples because of their signature looks, but because of the melancholic longing Burton managed to instill in them—character traits that made audiences not only find them “cool,” but also worthy of their care. It can be tough to remember that distinction, to clear the decades of Burton branding away to reveal the soul of his initial works. Likewise, it feels like audiences have forgotten the time when a Tim Burton film used to just be plain old fun.
His background as an animator served him well as the director of what are essentially living cartoons, where the gags have the visual setup–punch line style of a Tex Avery or Road Runner short. There’s a wild variety to the aesthetics of those early films, from the gothic beauty of Edward Scissorhands to the sci-fi anarchy of Mars Attacks! Even his design choices, now seen as mere Burton-esque navel-gazing, once felt grounded in a love of cinema: his vision of Gotham City a love letter to the German expressionism of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, his take on Sweeney Todd an ode to the Hammer horror films he loved as a kid.
Revisiting these inspired moments and films from Burton’s career is a reminder that his brand once came from a genuinely personal emotional and artistic place, even as it simultaneously makes it even more depressing to see what has been lost in the back half of his career. It’s at least refreshing to hear him confirm that he’s felt the same degradation of his filmography as audiences have. With his comments on the rekindling of his love of filmmaking (and his separation from Disney) comes the potential of a return to form, and an escape from the grave into which he’s been sinking for years.
In this light, the climax of his last film, Disney’s 2019 live-action remake of Dumbo, feels like a joyfully transgressive and rebellious beginning of a new chapter. After being forced to perform in a soulless theme park ruled over by a Disney-esque mogul, Dumbo rebels and takes flight.
“I realized that I was Dumbo,” said Burton in a 2022 interview. “I was working in this horrible big circus and I needed to escape.”
Perhaps this return to Beetlejuice, surrounded by some of his earliest collaborators, will jump-start the once-great artist’s post-escape third act. Perhaps, with the Juice loose once again, Burton can break free as well.
Kyle Wilson is a writer who lives in Brooklyn and is happiest when he’s writing about film, television, or his insatiable obsession with Joe Pesci’s performance in The Irishman. His work has appeared at Polygon and Screen Rant and you can follow him at @icanvalk.