Hollywood is showing no sign of slowing down when it comes to greenlighting sequels decades after the originals hit theaters. The latest of these is Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, featuring the return of director Tim Burton and stars Michael Keaton and Winona Ryder. And the best part is that it’s a pretty good sequel. Check out IGN’s Beetlejuice Beetlejuice review for more.
Beetlejuice Beetlejuice being a critical success was no sure thing. Burton may be one of the most acclaimed living American directors, but his career has yielded quite a few duds. In fact, Burton is a director whose lofty reputation hinges on a handful of truly great films from a specific portion of his career. Now that Beetlejuice Beetlejuice has hit theaters, let’s take a look back at Burton’s filmography and why his reputation has endured despite directing more misses than hits.
The Ups and Downs of Tim Burton’s Career
Following an early career as an animator, Muppet performer, and short film director, Burton basically exploded onto the scene with 1985’s Pee-wee’s Big Adventure. Even in his first feature-length project, Burton’s unique voice and sense of style were readily apparent. In fact, star and Pee-wee creator Paul Reubens specifically picked Burton to direct the big-screen spinoff based on the strength of Burton’s vision in 1984’s Frankenweenie (a short that Burton would later remake as a feature-length film in 2012).
Burton would quickly go on to create a string of hits in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, including 1988’s Beetlejuice, 1989’s Batman, 1990’s Edward Scissorhands, and 1994’s Ed Wood. These films became a showcase for his unique storytelling voice and visual sensibilities. They were presented as dark fairytales featuring lonely social outcasts, usually inhabiting Gothic landscapes. Whether Burton’s films are entirely fictional or based on real-life events, he developed a knack for focusing on a specific type of oddball dreamer. Are Johnny Depp’s Edward Scissorhands and Michael Keaton’s Batman really so different?
Burton also quickly began to show a tendency to collaborate with the same partners again and again. Keaton, Depp, and Reubens appeared frequently in these early films. The filmmaker’s distinctive eye was also bolstered by the equally unmistakable music of Danny Elfman (who to date has scored all but three of Burton’s films).
The first decade-and-a-half of Burton’s career was basically all hits.
The first decade-and-a-half of Burton’s career was basically all hits, apart from perhaps 1996’s Mars Attacks! However, that came to a screeching halt with the release of 2001’s Planet of the Apes remake. While a showcase for how far makeup and costuming had come since the 1968 original, Burton’s Apes was nonetheless a complete critical misfire and a pale shadow of the Charlton Heston classic.
From there, Burton’s track record became far more spotty. 2003’s Big Fish is an enjoyable, if perhaps overly sentimental, meditation on the importance of stories and the relationships between fathers and sons. 2007’s Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street is a competent adaptation of the Broadway musical. And 2014’s Big Eyes was a brief return to form that proved Burton still knows his way around a biopic.
But in between those few hits are an awful lot of misses. 2005’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory may be more faithful to the Roald Dahl novel, but it’s another remake that falls well short of the original film. 2010’s Alice in Wonderland is the poster child for Disney’s live-action remake obsession. It made plenty of money, for sure, but it’s also a bloated, plodding mess. 2012’s Dark Shadows is far from Burton and Depp’s finest hour. And 2016’s Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children delivers a disappointing answer to the fascinating question of “What if Burton directed an X-Men movie?” For a director who once fired on all cylinders, Burton has become an artist who seems to flounder more often than not.
The director is widely regarded as one of the great American filmmakers, but that reputation is mostly built on a specific, early part of his career. So what exactly went wrong?
Why Aren’t There More Great Burton Films?
Why did Burton’s track record as a director tank so suddenly and dramatically in the ‘00s? It’s hard to pinpoint an exact reason why things went south so abruptly with Planet of the Apes. But at least in part, it probably has a lot to do with the great contradiction of Burton’s artistic career. He’s a director known for crafting deeply sentimental and personal films, yet he very rarely works with original material.
Looking back at Burton’s filmography, nearly everything is either an adaptation (Pee-wee, Batman, Planet of the Apes, Big Fish, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, etc.) or a biopic (Ed Wood, Big Eyes). It’s rare to see Burton working with a wholly original story. The few exceptions include 1990’s Edward Scissorhands, 2005’s Corpse Bride, and 1993’s The Nightmare Before Christmas (undoubtedly the greatest Tim Burton movie Burton didn’t actually direct).
As mentioned before, Burton developed a real knack early on for honing in on protagonists who exist as lonely outsiders in society. Pee-wee is a lovable goof who really wants his bike back. Batman is a reclusive, orphaned millionaire who beats up criminals by night. Edward Scissorhands is a tortured artist. Ed Wood is a dreamer who doesn’t let his total lack of ability stand in the way of making art. This is how Burton achieves a deeply personal tone in his work despite rarely writing his films himself.
Looking at Burton’s post-golden age work, that personal quality often feels diminished.
But looking at Burton’s post-golden age work, that personal quality often feels diminished. In Planet of the Apes, Mark Wahlberg plays a bland, musclebound protagonist wholly unlike Burton’s usual heroes. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory should have been a natural fit for Burton’s talents, but Depp’s version of the character just comes across as weird and unlikable. Alice in Wonderland falls similarly flat, despite the natural pairing of director and source material. Burton’s later films simply feel hollow in a way his earlier work most certainly doesn’t.
It doesn’t help that Burton has never shown a tendency to latch onto specific writers in the same way he does actors and composer. The screenwriters who helped shape his early hits are generally nowhere to be found in his later work. In some cases that’s because they passed away in the ‘90s, as with Beetlejuice’s Michael McDowell and Warren Skaaren. But there are other writers with whom Burton found great success working together early on, yet for whatever reason that collaboration didn’t continue into the 21st century.
Edward Scissorhands writer Caroline Thompson illustrates this problem perhaps better than any. That film is widely regarded as both one of Burton’s best and most intensely personal films. Again, that’s despite the fact that Thompson, not Burton, was the one who wrote the script. She revealed that the character Edward was heavily inspired by Burton himself – a person with a deeply artistic soul who has trouble communicating in polite society.
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In a 1991 interview with Newsweek, Thompson said, “He is the most articulate person I know but I couldn’t tell you a single complete sentence he has ever said. This script is my love poem to Tim Burton.”
Thompson has collaborated twice with Burton in the years since, both times on animated projects (The Nightmare Before Christmas and Corpse Bride). It’s hard not to wonder what might have been had they continued to work together more frequently. How many more films with the deeply intimate quality of Edward Scissorhands might their collaboration have produced?
It’s telling that Burton’s best film of this century, Big Eyes, is one that reunited him with the Ed Wood writing team of Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski. These are writers who clearly understand Burton’s unusual sensibilities and know how to craft a story that both dramatizes the life of a real celebrity yet also feels like a Tim Burton movie. Again, it’s a shame Burton hasn’t collaborated with Alexander and Karaszewski more often.
Ultimately, the flaws in Burton’s more recent work tend to come down to story more than visual style or acting pedigree. Burton’s two great flaws have been in failing to choose projects that gel with his inimitable style, and in not cultivating the same sorts of creative bonds with writers that he’s enjoyed with Depp and Elfman. Better scripts and a more intimate focus on oddball protagonists are what Burton needs to shine. That’s exactly what we haven’t gotten with many of Burton’s more bloated recent films, particularly Disney fare like Alice in Wonderland and Dumbo. That bloat inherently clashes with the more personal and off-kilter approach where Burton normally shines.
Beetlejuice Beetlejuice may be another return to form for the director, but is there any reason to hope this trend will continue? Or is this another Big Eyes, merely a fleeting blip on the radar for an acclaimed director whose best work seems to be behind him?
What do you think? Will Burton ever recapture the glory of his ’80s and ’90s work? Cast your vote in our poll and let us know your thoughts in the comments below.
Jesse is a mild-mannered staff writer for IGN. Allow him to lend a machete to your intellectual thicket by following @jschedeen on Twitter.
