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Director Tim Burton has revealed why he doesn’t want to make another superhero movie.
The 65-year-old filmmaker, who will release the highly anticipated film “Beetlejuice” starring Jenna Ortega and Michael Keaton this September, directed both “Batman” and “Batman Returns” earlier in his career.
Burton said making a superhero movie in today’s film industry is definitely different from when he worked with Keaton on comic book blockbusters in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
Speaking to Variety , the filmmaker explained why he’s not interested: “I look at things from different perspectives, so I’d never say never to anything, but at this point, it’s not something I’m interested in.”
The Corpse Bride director added: “I was lucky because the word ‘franchise’ didn’t exist back then. Batman felt a bit experimental at the time… It was. [of a superhero movie] That may be so.”
Burton continued about his creative freedom: “We didn’t hear any feedback from the studio, and being in England it was even more remote. We really just had to focus on the film and not think too much about the sort of things they might be thinking about before filming now.”
Burton explained that he accepted the role in the 1992 Batman sequel, Batman Returns, because he was “inspired” by the film’s villains, the Penguin (Danny DeVito) and Catwoman (Michelle Pfeiffer), but quickly gave up on subsequent roles.
Michael Keaton (Lex) in Tim Burton’s Batman
“That’s when we started hearing about franchises,” he says, “and studios started saying, ‘What’s that black thing coming out of the Penguin’s mouth?’ That was my first exposure to the cold winds of that stuff.”
Alongside Batman, Burton was also in talks to develop a Superman movie starring Nicolas Cage, which never materialized, but was alluded to in 2023 when The Flash featured a CGI version of Cage battling a giant spider.
Looking back at the time production was nearly complete, Burton said, “There were a couple of films that I’d worked on for years that never got made, and that was really traumatic. I tried to focus on something that I felt strongly about and remove all the noise surrounding it.”
Keaton as Beetlejuice in Burton’s Beetlejuice (Warner Bros.)
Last year, Burton told The Independent that making the Beetlejuice sequels had reignited his passion for filmmaking.
“I really enjoyed this last one, Beetlejuice 2,” he said. “I just tried to strip everything back and get back to the basics of working with good people, good actors, good puppets. It was like going back to why I love making movies.”