After Dumbo, Burton doesn’t want to make any more Disney movies.
It’s no secret that legendary director and master of all things adorably spooky Tim Burton has had friction with Disney in the past. Despite his smash hit successes with films like The Nightmare Before Christmas, Burton’s sensibilities have frequently grinded against Disney’s, which has led to him being fired and re-hired several times. Going forward, however, it seems that Burton has officially had enough.
In an interview with Deadline at the Lumière Festival in France over the weekend, Burton explained that his work with Disney on the 2019 live-action adaptation of Dumbo proved to him that his priorities in filmmaking were just too different from the company’s to facilitate a good working relationship.
“My history is that I started out there. I was hired and fired like several times throughout my career there,” Burton said. “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.”
Tim Burton Says He’s Done Making Disney Movies, Calls Company a ‘Horrible Big Circus’ https://t.co/cNwoKWwueD pic.twitter.com/ruW2u3Decx
— IndieWire (@IndieWire) October 22, 2022
In addition to the priority disconnect, Burton confessed that he simply isn’t all that interested in Disney’s major blockbuster properties, specifically Star Wars and the Marvel Cinematic Universe. “It’s gotten to be very homogenized, very consolidated. There’s less room for different types of things,” he said in a nod to more avant-garde superhero films like his 1989 Batman treatment. “I can only deal with one universe, l can’t deal with a multi-universe.”