Having been famously fired (then re-hired) by Walt Disney Studios for creating what they believed was too scary of a kid’s movie with his 30-minute short Frankenweenie, the king of spooky Tim Burton has had quite a tumultuous relationship with the studio. Although their collaborations on Alice In Wonderland and the stop-motion Frankenweenie indicated some of their past issues were resolved, a certain flying elephant may have ended things between Burton and Disney for the foreseeable future.
The Dumbo director spoke about his falling out with the company while attending the Lumière Festival in France, where the filmmaker was honored with the Prix Lumière award this past weekend.
“My history is that I started out there. I was hired and fired like several times throughout my career there,” said Burton, per Deadline. “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.”
If there were ever a group of movies to break someone creatively, it’s pretty unsurprising that Disney’s recent live-action remakes would be at the front of the pack. Yet, Burton also noted that he just doesn’t feel all that compelled by the studio’s current slate of all things superheroes and Star Wars shows.
“It’s gotten to be very homogenized, very consolidated. There’s less room for different types of things,” he said, before adding that it’s highly unlikely we would see him doing a darker MCU film, à la his 1989 Batman. “I can only deal with one universe, l can’t deal with a multi-universe.”
Thankfully, there are no multiverses of madness in Burton’s upcoming Netflix series Wednesday—just plenty of the director’s beloved gothic imagery mixed in with Jenna Ortega’s Wednesday Adams being her usual chaotic self.