Tim Burton Claims He’s Done With Making Disney Movies

While taking part in a panel at the Lumière Festival in France, Tim Burton, spoke about how Disney is now focused on Marvel, Pixar and Star Wars franchises.

“It’s gotten to be very homogenized, very consolidated. There’s less room for different types of things.”

And following his experiences working on the live-action version of “Dumbo” with Disney, he is unlikely to be working with them in the future. In fact, he says he felt like the trapped elephant he was depicting on-screen:

“My history is that I started out there. I was hired and fired like several times throughout my career there. The thing about Dumbo, is that’s why I think my days with Disney are done, I realized that I was “Dumbo”, that I was working in this horrible big circus and I needed to escape. That movie is quite autobiographical at a certain level.

In the late 80s, all through the 90s,  Burton found a way to make personal auteured movies that, somehow, also managed to reach the mainstream. Films like “Beetlejuice,” “Batman,” “Edward Scissorhands,” “Ed Wood” “Mars Attacks,” and “Sleepy Hollow” all had that Burton imprint.

However, in the past 15 years, Burton has resorted to directing very branded commercial movies that just don’t resemble his earlier and more personal projects.

Burton's 2010 adaptation of “Alice in Wonderland” earned over $1 billion at the global box office.  It also cemented his 21st-century reputation as the go-to-director for classic children's fantasy.  That's been his thing now: ‘Alice,’ “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory," “Dark Shadows,” "Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children" and "Dumbo."

Suffice to say, Burton has been stuck in a rut for more than a decade. His last great movie? Probably "Sweeney Todd" back in 2007. He also made a more-than-decent film about painter Margaret Keane called "Big Eyes" back in 2014, that one re-teamed him with his "Ed Wood" co-screenwriters Larry Karszewski and Scott Alexander. Other than that, Tim Burton has been playing the role of corporate shill for Disney.

Burton currently has no film lined up for release or production, but something tells me, now that he’s done with Disney, he’ll be back to making less corporatized films.