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Tim Burton rose during a very peculiar time in popular culture. The terse, depressive adult dramas of the 1970s had given way to the ultra-slick, spectacle-heavy blockbusters of the 1980s as a new generation of adventure films entered the marketplace, helmed by precocious filmmakers who spent their youths in actual film schools. At the same time, the financial and cultural conservatism of the Reagan administration had amplified the voices of rebellious punkers and enterprising artistic weirdos who wanted nothing to do with the commercial world. The odd circumstances — an increase of money paired with a general antiestablishment malaise — were just right for anti-mainstream freaks to break into the public eye.
All of a sudden, filmmakers like David Lynch, Tobe Hooper, and Paul Verhoeven could make big hits, and Tim Burton could be embraced by the public at large. Burton, in particular, could not have risen to fame in any other epoch.
Burton was a child of B-movies and helped birth the Goth movement, along with Bauhaus and Siouxsie Sioux. Lydia Deetz, the character played by Winona Ryder in Burton’s 1988 film “Beetlejuice,” became an icon of Goths everywhere, and Burton’s semi-whimsical, semi-depressive, death-facing, cartoon-loving weirdness caught on around the globe. He redefined Batman, making the hero a Gothic, expressionistic antihero, and he told many tales of wistful romance between oddballs and outsiders.
Eventually, though, audiences became tired of his output, and many began rejecting his work. Since about 2000, it seemed like Burton, rather than pursuing projects that interested him, was merely plugged into extant IP that fit his sensibilities already. Some of these latter Burton films were not welcomed with open arms, and some have even been outright panned. Burton always put his heart into a film’s design, costumes, and quirky visuals, but he wasn’t always working with good ideas or screenplays.
Of all of Burton’s features, though, his remake of “Planet of the Apes” and his adaptation of “Dark Shadows” received the worst notices.
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