Every Tim Burton Movie Ranked (Pee Wee to Beetlejuice Beetlejuice)

Beetlejuice Beetlejuice has dropped in theaters that means we have a new Tim Burton movie and not just a new Tim Burton movie but a new Tim Burton movie so today I'm going to stop and rank all 20 Tim Burton movies from the worst to the [Music] best hi my name is Sean and I love to talk about movies and TV way too much with that in mind go ahead and join me down below in the comment section share your ranking of all 20 Tim Burton films or at least let let me know which are your favorites which are your least favorites if you like this type of video I've done a bunch of other director rankings just like this one Tarantino M Night Shyamalan Nolan and many many more you can check them out I don't know somewhere around here I'll put up a card let's get started in last place Dark Shadows I did not get this movie whatsoever it was just a bizarre blend of tones and genres I'm not really familiar with the original soap opera from the 1960s apparently they put out like 1,200 episodes in the course of about 6 years which I don't even know how that's possible but doing that research and learning a bit about how much lore and all the different characters existed for this adaptation it made a little bit more sense how wild and crazy this movie was in terms of just how many plots it was trying to cover but it doesn't justify it it was still this movie movie that had like great set design some cool art Direction some costumes that were nice and then it was just shifting from soap opera to campy humor to dark humor to just like brutal horror it was all over the place and I just didn't care about any of the characters I didn't care about any of the lore it was not remotely my thing I didn't get it at all number 19 Allison Wonderland on paper Tim Burton seems like kind of an interesting person to adapt aliceon Wonderland because of his specific visual style but something went horribly wrong in this adaptation The Source material always kind of towed that line between Whimsical and weird and when you add this much Tim Burton dark creepiness into the mix it just has a totally different vibe to it things like off with their heads when you make it really literal and put it in live action it just has a very different tone than it originally had while reading Lewis Carroll and it feels like instead of trusting The Source material and having the word play and the wit be the selling point for an Allison Wonderland adaptation instead they tried to squish the lore into the Blockbuster template with a full-blown Heroes Journey for Alice where she like actually like battles a knight in a dragon stuff like that where just the whole concept of Lewis Carroll and his absurdest humor gets completely lost adding to that we have a scenario where because Johnny Depp was this massive movie star at the time the Mad Hatter gets promoted to lead of a movie with Alice in the title and so for me this is just kind of a a classic example of a director that's done great things that has a unique style having get adapting amazing Source material but when it's squished through the Hollywood Blockbuster formula everything gets lost it's turned totally generic and so for all the weirdness that's going on in this movie it's just so utterly Bland it's just Blockbuster stuff 18 Dumbo now I've never been the biggest Dumbo fan and that film it's only about an hour long and there's several sequences in it that you can't really adapt directly in the 21st century and so they had to like flesh it out to turn it into this 2hour Blockbuster I can appreciate that it's a remake but also a reimagining also kind of an extension and a sequel all in one package but in the execution there's just not much here that I think is particularly good right off the bat there's almost no Tim Burton on display it just feels like he was a Hired Gun to try and do Blockbuster Magic on Dumbo but none of his unique flare is there everything about this movie just feels phony to me from the look of it it's like overly processed and color corrected the characters the drama they all feel forced and overcooked the script itself is um filled with plot beats that are repeated characters in particularly the adults making really stupid and bad choices so nothing feels properly earned and then even beyond that there's just something really amusing about the fact that kind of the villain of the story is this rich company that's an amusement park that's acquiring all of these other successful shows to be a part of his brand promising to keep them the same and not change them which is literally what Disney's business model has been for the last 20 years the lack of self-awareness is astounding sometimes I talk about bigname directors being turned into McDonald's managers for Disney this is what I'm referring to they get Tim Burton to make a totally generic liveaction remake of Dumbo next up Planet of the Apes a shockingly generic take on the planet of the apes Planet of the Apes as a property feels like one ripe to bring in a bunch of Burton isms and his creativity and his visual flare and this movie is utterly devoid of any of that this feels like a film that anyone could have directed because there's nothing distinct about its style at all visually speaking it's incredibly Bland because everything is kind of overly lit a lot of it was shot very clearly on sound stages and so it almost feels like you're watching a play at times because of the lighting and the nature of the set design and even though it was this big expensive film I I think it looks much cheaper than it was you sign on to a project and their the budget is not necessarily locked and the script has to change it was it was a strange right there was budget problems there was this and that and the thing is I think is a transition in terms of effects the reason I got interested was I love the old school of it I love the idea of makeup and actors pretending to be Apes what they would have really liked is what they ended up doing next which is kind of you know great digital animation and redefining it that way it was I think it was at an awkward time and beyond that all of kind of the the social commentary the tragedy the wit is stripped away and you're left with just this generic Mark Walberg sci-fi Blockbuster that tries to have a clever twist at the end that doesn't make any sense whatsoever so just a movie that is devoid of anything interesting whatsoever number 16 Sweeney Todd this was a first time watch for me not a big musical person but I was curious what would be a murderous musical by Tim Burton be and there were elements of it that I enjoyed it teased some plot lines and directions that it could go that I found interesting and then as it went along I felt like it always kind of veered away from anything that I could have connected onto where there was it starts with it a bit of a Revenge vibe to it bit of a musical serial killer Count of Monte Cristo but then it always veered into something different that it didn't really do that it didn't really develop those ideas and so it just kind of leaned heavily into the weird serial killer side to it with a bunch of meat pies that like kept pulling me away from everything that I cared about in the movie and even the way that it kind of handles the The Kills in it it's like not a lot happens and then we Montage through 30 people having the exact same thing happened to them and then we're like by the the third act to it so I don't know I another one that I just don't feel was for me and I don't really understand the way the story was structured next up Corpse Bride and this is another one which I just don't think really is for me I don't tend to enjoy stop motion all that much and when it he kind of goes full Tim Burton there's only so many of those that I kind of fully enjoy he tends to explore a l lot of the same ideas there's a lot of the same visual style and perhaps some of it was maybe the order in which I watched some of these but when I watched Corpse Bride it just felt a little bit like I feel like I've been here before and I don't need another one of these stories about bizarre relationships dark maab humor and all like I just felt like we'd done that before he he's made something like this and he's done it better on other occasions so um like it it didn't bother me it's not like the ones some you know Sweeney Todd and this one kind of fall into that not really for me but I can understand why other people like them so it's not like the the bottom four on here where I felt like those were devoid of style or Merit I get why someone would really enjoy this movie but that's not me next up Mars Attacks now I saw this movie when it first came out almost 30 years ago and never rewatched it until I was prepping this video also never realized it was based on a series of tops trading cards from the 1960s and essentially the rewatch affirmed the feelings that I've had for 28 years that this is a wildly uneven film there are some really good jokes that I remember from 28 years back and those jokes still land but for every joke that lands and that's memorable there's so many more that just fall entirely flat it's a movie that has so many plot lines and some of them make sense for the movie and are fun satire and a bunch of them just go nowhere like the beginning was kind of interesting the end was kind of interesting and then the middle it just gets bogged down in weird romance and seduction plot lines just just really bizarre stuff and just inherently a movie like this that's starzing already kind of campy goofy 1950s Invasion films it feels like kind of a one joke movie and we're just repeating this same joke of like look how silly those things were look how silly we can take that silly thing from the 1950s and repeats that joke over and over again seems like they had a lot of fun making this movie they had some ideas that amused themselves but they didn't have a clear idea what story they wanted to tell or which IDE ideas were good and they should develop and which ideas were bad and they should just trim out entirely and it seems like the grid they used to decide what got screen time was which scenes had the biggest movie stars and all of a sudden non-interesting characters and jokes that don't land get a whole lot of time because it's Jack Nicholson or whatever and so a movie that like you remember it because it's so bizarre but not because it's actually good and clever 13 Miss parag's Home for Peculiar Children kind of like Tim Burton's spin on Harry Potter except with more World War II thrown in there as well as a little bit of Samuel L Jackson eating eyeballs um I mean it was fine like if you're into these kind of movies it's a little bit X-Men it's it's people with special powers being mentored by by someone it's one of those stories and um you know there's a few interesting ideas in here about the time loops and by pulling it into World War II that it just there's a a little bit to that that's kind of fun but considering it is about people with a bunch of powers it's directed by Tim Burton you have time Loops it's it just feels like it's lacking any or energy to it like it never comes to life it's a surprisingly dull and Bland movie where Tim Burton has some really fun toys to play around with 12 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory now this is a movie that was always in a bit of a tough situation anytime you're doing a new adaptation of of a book where the previous adaptation is viewed as a Timeless classic you're always going to be compared to something that you can't compareed to favorably a Timeless classic has stood the test of time and people still love it in fact they rever it more the more time passes that's what happened with Wily Wonka the Chocolate Factory and they decided they wanted to do a new adaptation of the r doll book and they brought in Tim Burton and so naturally they tried to make it different and focus on different elements of the characters different character arcs and given that this was post Pirates of the Caribbean Johnny Depp was now one of the biggest names in Hollywood so suddenly we're we're amping up Willie Wonka's role and giving him this whole backstory about his daddy issues and and some of it kind of works some of it can have those heartfelt moments uh but it always feels like it's trying a little bit too hard to distinguish itself from the previous one so we have to have oopa loopa songs but they have to be different they have to be very different give off a totally different vibe and some of those things don't work so well some of them do some of them are kind of interesting but overall it's a movie that just always feels like it exists in the shadow of the70s classic version number 11 Sleepy Hollow despite being possibly the most famous Gothic Visionary director who tells many stories about the afterlife skeleton's dark humor he doesn't actually spend all that much time just in the horror genre and sleepy Hol is one of those few examples that is a straightforward horror film about a serial killer and an investigation into it and it's kind of fascinating that while this in many regards is one of the more overtly violent films that he's made it's also fairly subtle on the Burton isms there's definitely some in there there's some weirdness some quirkiness and campiness that happens in it but it's not as in your face as so many of his other films works well enough at kind of building out the Intrigue about the conspiracy of what's really going on behind the scenes Who's involved how's it all taking place J depth performance uh this was a first time watch for me just a week or so back and so I've seen all the performances that he did after this movie that this feels like the prototype for so many of his weirdo roles that he's done in this Century as it goes along I think it gets a bit convoluted with all the answers to everything of what's kind of taking place and it loses a little bit of its o but you know it's it's a very watchable little um Burton version of a period piece horror film bringing us into the top 10 big eyes this is one of the most conventional films that Tim Burton has ever directed and it's a good one-time watch movie and what I mean by that is that it is a competently told version of an interesting story where it it tackles this event involving this artist from the 1950s and 60 that was incredibly popular where there was this crazy backstory of everything that unfolded and how this conflict was resolved is fascinating but it's not like a movie that is incredibly emotionally moving that you get super invested in it it's kind of like yeah I enjoyed seeing this unfold you did a good job at it but I've seen it that's I don't need to rewatch it I don't need to experience that again so it when you have a director like Tim Burton that has so many movies that are so distinct and memorable and they pop and they create these worlds that you want to keep exploring when you have a movie like this that just feels very conventional but it's good it's tough to rank amongst some of the others number nine Big Fish Tim Burton's version of Forest Gump at least that's the way it plays in my mind where it's a story of a son trying to connect with his father that he feels like he's never really gotten to know because his father loves to tell all of these big epic tales and hyperbolized every story that he has and so the son never really knows what is or isn't true and who his father really is and it kind of kind of plays that out that idea of do you really know someone and do these Tall Tales actually communicate everything you need to know about the person just with a little bit more flare and spice to them and through this exploration finds a way to connect with his father it has some really nice moment to it it can be poignant at times I think I I've always struggled a little bit with the central concept of it when it's trying to communicate about what really matters in in letting go and what the way we communicate things that um I don't know that hyperbolized versions of everything is is what you need sometimes you need a simple vulnerable moment when you have a son begging the father to to give it gives for begging his dying father to give him that and the dad still won't let go of all the talltail and everything like that uh um I don't know how I feel about that but it's an interesting kind of perspective on how we know people and how we interpret and process our life and share it with others next up Franken weenie this one's a tricky one for me because I thought it was really well done but it's also the kind of movie like I don't know that I want to rewatch that and almost I feel that way because it was well done it is this very sweet sweet story about a boy and his dog and I'm very much a dog person and love my dogs but a story that's about a dog dying and then coming back and still being himself not a pet cemetery situation but still being a lot of complications that come with that it's a very like heroic and traumatic experience for me to experience it as sweet and heartfelt as it can be but like of the Tim Burton stop motion films this is the one that I think I connected with the most and some of that probably is being a dog person and just able to tap into things that very much resonate with me uh it's a film that feels like it's for a very very narrow audience where it's uh stop motion it's very much about dogs but you have to be okay with the dog dying you have to be okay with a a monster story like several different things to it feels like it's very for a very specific person but if you're that specific person probably hits a lot of the right notes for you I thought a lot of the music in it f sounded like it was lifted straight out of the Batman score I mean it's Danny Elfman and so there's always a little bit of Elfman isms in in any of his robust scores but felt like there were specific Melodies that were like that's right out of Batman Victor the most common descriptions of the character lonely isolated maybe a little depressed has a dog that he loves spends time in graveyards all of these things you yourself I believe have have done and with many of the characters that have been sort of the protagonists of your films you felt personally connected to them is that coincidental no I would say it's coincidental I mean even films where I you know been based on other things I I you you always for me I I like to feel the character um number seven our new film Beetle Juice Beetle Juice I thought that this was a very fun continuation where they were able to recapture the magic bring a bunch of the cast members back bring some new people in and have another adventure that felt like it fit with the original uh jenet Ortega in particular she's this generation's Winona writer this generation's Christina Ri so she fits right in to the world of Tim Burton his weirdness is craziness his style of humor Katherine O'Hara is having a absolute blast playing up her character from the original film but feeling like she's in a different place but she's still the same person and so there's things that come out of that in particular with the relationship with one own writer and Michael Keaton has still got it even in his 70s he has not slowed down at all now there's too many plot lines in this movie and so it's like they're still introducing new plot lines when you're 60% of the way through the movie and then you get to the end of it you're like wait that's all you were doing with Monica Luchi that that said why on Earth did we do that you had a subplot tied to the subplot that went nowhere but it has all the chaos the energy that you want from a Beetle Juice number six Batman Returns and this is one of the earliest movies I remember tracking the full release of the film from announcement trailers trying to find every piece of information that I could find out about it this is of course was pre internet and you know I was very young at the time so my resources were limited but it was one of the very first films that I remember being excited for its release and by that point in time my mother my sister and I were into you know collecting things so we had all of the McDonald's toys and cups and collector all the things that they released we collected every single one of them and uh for me this is a gigantic piece of my childhood and my journey into movie fandom along with the 89 film and we'll get to that in just a second Danny what did you think of the movie it was very violent it was a total attack against kids the whole movie everything that kids love was being used against them like what clowns I was actually a little bit scared and I have never been scared of a movie like this before I came out of Terminator 2 fine it's just not for younger kids um penguin always had goop coming out of his mouth um Catwoman took her claws and played tic tac toe on a man's face with all the McDonald's toys it's making it sound like it is for kids and it's not so I was 10 years old when this movie came out and I uh definitely thought it was dark didn't have that kid's opinion on it though I think that this is a much better Burton movie than it is a Batman movie he reinterprets Batman Penguin and Catwoman through his Burton worldview so now all of a sudden all three of them are Lono loner weirdo Freaks and in their own different version of it the one that turns into the hero uh the victim that turns into a villain and then the monster that tries to rage rage havoc on the society that rejected him and so when you th view it through that lens I think it it's kind of an interesting film the score from Elfman is one of his bests it it elevates so much of this movie and brings so much um emotion into it the production design here of course is very cool once again though it does feel like a totally different Gotham than the one that we saw in the previous film so it's a movie that if you kind of take it on its own terms as a burton superhero story it works as a Batman movie I I have quite a few issues with it number five Ed Wood this was the first essentially serious drama from Tim Burton and for it he decided to do a film about the life and film career of Ed Wood who is widely regarded as the worst director of all time and while it kind of tells the story of how he made three of the worst films ever made one of them widely regarded as the worst movie ever made it doesn't do it in a manner that's intended to just make fun of him it's intended in kind of this way to to honor his optimism and his joy and his creative spirit and there's something kind of in infectious about that there's something very Charming about a movie that's able to present someone doing terrible work but without laughing at them without it being something to make fun of them it's intended as this thing where you watch it and you kind of go huh that's kind of interesting I kind of respect that a little bit I respect what he did there despite the work itself not being particularly good legendarily bad but not particularly good Johnny Depp is is just pretty amazing in this you've said that Johnny's inspiration I find it very thought-provoking Ronald Reagan yeah he's got strange uh influences which you know and it it it it's the kind of movie that reminds you who Johnny Depp was before Jack Sparrow where he kind of got swept away into having to play uh these all these Jack Sparrow esque weirdos for the last 20 years but for the 20 years before that he played all of these very different roles in films and this is a couple years after he did Edward Scissorhand totally different character from when plays Edwood and he has a a a an accent that you buy into it he has a you just believe him as this overly ambitious guy that has absolutely no Talent it's a little bit like The Disaster Artist in a very different sort of way but I thoroughly enjoyed the Disaster Artist and I thought this one had a good bit to offer to number four Beetle Juice the movie that really put Tim Burton on the map as a creative Force with a very distinct style and one of the funniest things about this movie is that nobody knew what to make of it when it first came out frankly I walked into this movie knowing nothing about it I didn't know it was going to be a Ghostbusters clone and I like that relationship between Gina Davis and Alec Bal and I thought it was going to be a goofy silly comedy about this young married couple trying to fix up this crummy house and then when all the supernatural stuff hit the special effects boy they're well done but so what because there's no comic energy behind it it was on some of the 10 worst films of the my friend that and Beetlejuice were on the 10 worst films of the year list but it's one of those films that just made a mark to where 35 years later like a year ago my children heard about Beetlejuice and they became interested in this world this lore the character not because I was trying to introduce them to Beetlejuice just because that's how big of a splash it made with a distinctive character Vibe aesthetic all of that fun stuff so much so that when we went to go see Beetlejuice Beetlejuice they were like we got to dress up like sandworms they wanted to do the whole deal and everything like that it's a bit of an interesting film because Beetlejuice is in the movie for less than 20 minutes and the lead characters are actually the Gina Davis and Alec Baldwin characters who were haunting this house but all the stuff you remember is almost everything else in the movie so it's just like a fascinating film that's all about the chaos it's all about the energy and exploring this bizarre set of world this bizarre uh afterlife world that they've created real quick before I give you my top three remember to join me down below in the comment section share your ranking of the Tim Burton films or at least let me know what are your favorites what are your least favorites and which of my placements is the hottest take also I've done a bunch of these director rankings Tarantino ight Shyamalan Nolan Spielberg and many many more you can check them out in this this playlist right over here coming in in third place is Batman now this is one of the very first movies I remember seeing in the theater and this movie was essentially my onramp into getting into nerd culture all that fun stuff I still have my full collection of the trading cards actually I still have my full set of Batman Returns cards in here as well but this is a a movie that was a defining element of my childhood I had the VHS tape that I watched on Loop I had the toys all of that fun stuff um in 1989 Tim Burton by creating this film launched bat Mania and that was so much of my childhood as important and impactful as the film was I don't know that it fully holds up on a script level it's it's a bit of an odd film when you look at the way it's structured in the way that it kind of cuts between scenes and sequences and um you know Bruce Wayne is barely a character in the first 30 minutes of the movie and even as it's showing Joker's rise to prominence it's like just cutting between these mob scenes that could go in any particular order and then it's all of a sudden we're doing chemical stu stuff and the shampoos poisoned very very strange script for the movie that it get all the stuff Burton brings to it with the production design the imagery the gothic vibe to it is great just wish the script was maybe I it's a little bit even tough to say that cuz to get to where we're at with the sophistication of comic book movies and their scripts and their storytelling you needed all the middle things to figure out how do you adapt these Comics into the format and this is one of those early films that was an important piece to that in taking them seriously and being campy but the script sophistication isn't quite there yet you know Batman was too dark you know now it's you know it's like almost a light comedy compared to things so our runnerup Edward Scissor Hands this is another one that I saw in the theater when it first came out and I'd never rewatched it and I never rewatched it because it was so effective at what it was trying to do and so I wasn't really sure when I rewatched it where it would land in this ranking cuz there are quite a few you know Burton movies where I realized like H you know I'm not as into Tim Burton as I thought maybe I was and then I rewatched Edward Scissor Hands and I think it almost made it clear to me why some of the other ones felt a little bit empty where I think this is Tim Burton's magnum opus of his exploration of kind of this isolated Outsider that doesn't fit in to Society for me I was want to make something that something that I felt as a teenager as a young as an whatever anytime was probably the most personal or one of the most personal things this is the movie where he brought all of that to life where even through the color palette where the town is pastels and these clean lines and then you have Edward who's in this just black white gray World steps in and he's so obviously out of place and that's kind of what Tim Burton's career has always been exploring that and this is the time where at the kind of the first time he really leaned in exploring it and I think he got it right he did it right in this one with this tragic Romance that's like a twisted Dr Seuss tail in live action and uh another one with just a fantastic score from Danny Elfman all of the early Danny Elfman work I I think is is phenomenal and another one where the score just brings so much emotion into an already gut-wrenching tail and rewatching it I knew exactly why I hadn't rewatched it because it is such an effective tragedy that even when you know where it's going it still turns your stomach there's still these moments that I I had not seen in over 30 years that they still stuck with me and there's not a lot of movies that I watched one time in 1990 that I still remember the way they made me feel this is a movie that did that that's a great movie but coming in at number one I got to go with peewee's big adventured Tim Burton's first film now full disclosure I grew up watching peewee's Playhouse and peewee's big adventure all of the time I had friends that had all the toys and everything like that I am of the peewee's playhouse generation and this movie is is one of those films where it's almost weird just how much talent emerged from it where it Tim Burton's first movie obviously he's gone on to become this massively successful director of the last 35 plus years and of course PeeWee Herman is propelled into the mainstream and got his own TV show that kind of defined the childhood for my entire generation but also in there it was Danny elfman's first big score that he ever did and from the very opening scene Danny elfman's score just brings this movie to life it's triumphant it's wacky it's insane it's like everything that Danny Elfman became known for over the next 15 20 years it was present in this original score that he did for a movie about a grown man trying to track down his bike and that's so much of what makes peewee's big adventure just this film and one more Talent people forget about that worked on this film Phil Hartman is one of the credited screenwriters it also has this sense of self-importance in the way that it tackles all of this it's a it's a very much an acquired taste if someone watched this and I don't get this and put it in the bottom of their list I'd be like I don't I fair enough if if this isn't for you I get it this absolutely I think is is awesome um and you know I've show it to my kids and like they have so much fun watching it and all the quotable lines that I've been saying to people for my entire life independent of me saying them my kids have picked up on saying them and a fun fact if you did not know this the actor that plays PeeWee Herman in the movie inside of the movie at the end of it is James Brolin Josh Brolin's Dad thanos's Dad Cable's dad plays PeeWee Herman at the end of this one which is just a fun detail about the film put all the pieces together this is just such an important film in my childhood uh that I still think holds up as this Bizarro unique comedy that feels like it could have come out at any point in time and be equally weird and standout so it comes out comes in I forgot how to end my rankings I forgot I say the same thing at the end of every single ranking and I just said it wrong what is going on here so it comes in at number one if you enjoyed this video I've got more rankings just like it you can check them out right over there in that playlist we got Tarantino Nolan Spielberg and so many more thank you so much for watching and keep talking movies and TV too much bye-bye