Tim Burton is one of the most iconic and recognizable filmmakers working today. Even somebody who doesn’t quite know or understand what a director does can get an idea just by looking at a Tim Burton film. Burton’s style is so iconic it can be replicated, parodied, and homaged in other media. Burton is a brand, one audience recognizes and the director has made an impressive career not only bringing to life original ideas but imagining classic tales like Alice in Wonderland, Batman, and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow through his eyes.
It is hard to believe the once fresh visionary director has now been working as a main creative voice for almost five decades. The release of The Addams FamilyNetflix series Wednesday will mark Burton’s first major television series in his career as well as his first project in the 2020s. That combined with the director recently receiving the Lifetime Achievement Lumière Award, has us looking back at how Tim Burton’s career has developed, and how the past decades rank among each other.
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4 The 2010s - Burton May Have Lost Himself
Walt Disney Pictures
The 2010s is an interesting decade for Burton as it was kicked off with Alice in Wonderland, which is still to this day the highest-grossing film in the director’s filmography. However, few would say Alice in Wonderland is anywhere near the top of their Tim Burton ranking, and the movie received negative reviews from critics. It also becomes a rosetta stone for the director’s career for the rest of the decade.
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He had big adaptations that seemed tailor-made for him, like Dark Shadow and Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children, that bombed at the box office and were trashed by critics, or Disney movies like his remakes of Frankenweenie and Dumbo. The one film that stands out is 2014’s Big Eyes, which does feel like the director trying to replicate the style and feel of Big Fish and Ed Wood but to more mixed results. Interestingly, that’s the only title that isn’t a remake or adaptation of some kind, which suggest that Burton is better with originality.
Burton seems to acknowledge an issue with this part of his career, as he recently spoke about working within Disney and has no interest in returning. Burton said:
It appears that Burton may have learned from his mistakes, and hopefully looked back at his career from the past decade at his non-Disney films as well and can return to what audiences loved about his movies in the first place.
3 The 2000s - Burton is Finding Himself
Warner Bros.
The 2000s began with what most people would agree is Burton’s first real misfire, 2001’s Planet of the Apes starring Mark Wahlberg. While the movie opened big and performed well at the box office, nobody seemed to like it and the confusing twist became a source of ridicule. Burton quickly rebounded with the critically acclaimed Big Fish. While it did not get the Oscar attention many expected, the film was a great mix of Burton’s fairy tale visuals with a real emotional human story.
His next three films of the decade would feature his two long-time collaborators, friend Johnny Depp and then-girlfriend Helena Bonham Carter: Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Corpse Bride, and Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street. While none of these are the best films in Burton’s filmography, they still capture the magic and imagination that made audiences fall in love with him in the first place.
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory looked to do a big-budget adaptation of the book rather than the original movie, Corpse Bride helped usher in a new era of stop-motion pictures in the 2000s and 2010s, and Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street is a musical like only Tim Burton could make. It’s an odd collection of films from the director in this decade but one that makes his overall filmography more interesting.
2 The 1980s - Burton Enters the Scene With a Bang
Tim Burton’s career as a feature film director started in 1985 (after the short 1984 film Frankenweenie) and despite only releasing three movies in that decade, they are timeless, beloved films that launched one of the most successful Hollywood careers: Pee’s Wee’s Big Adventure, Beetlejuice, and Batman.
Pee Wee’s Big Adventure shows early on the creative, visionary mind Burton has to bring this absurd character into a world he doesn’t quite fit into but changes, much like how Burton sees himself and becomes the template for many of Burton’s movies. With Beetlejuice, Burton took an original script and imprinted his own creative vision on it. He implemented claymation, practical monster work that paid homage to the B-monster movies that Burton loved so much, helping draw attention to how cheap it all looks with loving affection that became part of the movie’s charm that has made Beetlejuice a comedy classic and a Halloween staple.
Yet it is Batman that might be the most seismic shift not just for his career but for Hollywood. Comic book writers like Dennis O’Neal and Frank Miller had been attempting to move Batman away from the perceptions audiences had of the character with the 1960s Adam West television show, but it was Burton’s Gotham City designed by the late Anton Furst that drew from German expressionism, 1920s neo-noir, and gothic architecture that made a whole new world for the Dark Knight to inhabit. The sleek black leather Batsuit and the bold decision to cast Michael Keaton as Batman changed Hollywood overnight. It made Batman the crown jewel of Warner Bros. films, helped legitimize superhero films, and changed how movies were marketed. It also set up Tim Burton as THE director at the moment, and he parlayed that goodwill into the next decade.
1 The 1990s - Burton is Personal, Mainstream, and Great
20th Century Fox
Tim Burton begins the 1990s with his most personal and iconic film, Edward Scissorhands. He then ends the decade with what was one of his biggest hits and a Halloween staple, Sleepy Hollow. In between this period he also released Batman Returns, a sequel that while controversial at the time of its release has grown in estimation among critics and fans, and Mars Attacks which, while a bomb at the time, is a great comedy that shows Burton’s love of B-movie camp. This is the decade where his name became a brand; Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas was a selling point even though Burton did not direct the picture. Yet now it is one of the most iconic films associated with the director.
This is also the decade that Burton made Ed Wood, what many rightfully consider to be his best film. Ed Wood breaks away from his traditional visual aesthetics but also allows him to be more true to himself by fully being able to replicate the look, style, and tone of the many B-horror pictures he grew up watching that influenced him. Burton, much like Ed Wood Jr. in the film, is a guy who just wants to make strange movies that speak to him with his colorful friends.
Burton is often known for his long-time collaborations, and it is notable the 1990s are when he first started working with Johnny Depp. The ’90s were Burton at his biggest, where his strange sensibilities somehow matched up with the mainstream. For many, Burton’s films showed that it was okay to be different, to be an outsider — that eventually everyone will find their place.
