Today marks the 20th Anniversary of Tim Burton and Henry Selick's The Nightmare Before Christmas. If you happen to venture to Disneyland (and I presume Disney World) over the next month, you'll find that the world of Tim Burton's Halloween/Christmas hybrid tale litters the park. Be it Jack Skellington and Sally walking around alongside Mickey Mouse or the entire Haunted Mansion ride redone for the holiday season to be filled not with traditional ghosts but with Nightmare Before Christmas imagery, the film has become a centerpiece of Disney's brand during the months of September through December. This is not a little ironic when you consider that back in 1993, Disney was both terrified and a little embarrassed by the film.
Now in 2013, Disney's fear of Tim Burton's sketchbook come-to-life (actually directed by Henry Selick) might appear as foolish as Billy Zane dissing Picasso in the opening moments of Titanic. But Tim Burton was not always the parent-approved provider of kid-friendly nightmares that he is today. Back in 1993, he was coming off of Batman Returns. Batman Returns was the highest grossing film of summer 1992 but caused a huge controversy due to its graphic violence and terrifying imagery.
While Batman Returns earned its PG-13 it was also infamously sold to children via McDonalds happy meal tie-ins and the usual kid-friendly marketing. The film basically invented the "quick-kill blockbuster", opening with a record $47 million but departing most theaters in under 8 weeks with $162m under its belt, or about 65% of the $251m that Batman grossed in 1989. Point being, in 1993, Tim Burton was not a purveyor of trusted babysitter material. The Nightmare Before Christmas was released under the adult-skewing Touchtone banner, with a PG rating (rare for an animated feature at the time), and the hopes and prayers that the film wouldn't terrify a legion of children or, more importantly, their parents who were buying the tickets.
The picture went out on just two screens on October 15th, earning an eye-popping $95,000 per-screen and the second-biggest per-screen average of all time behind Disney's 2-screen debut of Aladdin a year before. It went out on a cautious 563 screens the next week, racking up a solid $11,074 per-screen for a decent $6.2m weekend. I distinctly remember seeing the weekend numbers on Monday night and presuming the film had tanked before realizing that it had only opened on 500 screens. The film finally went wide on 1,600+ screens over Halloween weekend, earning $8.2 million and topping the box office for two straight weekends. It earned $7m the next weekend.
But Disney had so little faith in the project that they had slotted their big-budget revamp of The Three Musketeers for November 12th of that year, meaning that the somewhat surprise success of The Nightmare Before Christmas couldn't really be capitalized on. The (underrated) Charlie Sheen/Kiefer Sutherland/Oliver Platt adventure was Disney's big holiday release. It was the one that got to debut the legendary first teaser for The Lion King, consisting of just the jaw-dropping "Circle of Life" sequence. So despite solid reviews, surprisingly robust initial box office, and an almost instant cult following (which allegedly included audiences showing up in homemade costumes), The Nightmare Before Christmas barely crossed the $50m mark in its initial theatrical run.
But that's of course not where the story ends. As the film became attained a cult following, with the kids who grew up with it making it the de-facto holiday film for their kids over the next two decades, Disney's tune changed. As befitting the annual holiday traditions, Disney began rereleasing the film in theaters during the holiday season. The 2000 reissue on 72 theaters earned just $346,000 They reissued the film in 3-D starting in 2006, a re-issue that earned the film $8m and followed it with a 2007 reissue that earned a whopping $14m. The next two years saw two more less successful reissues, probably because the film had received a glorious blu-ray release by then, but the 2008 and 2009 runs brought in $1.5m.
Via these reissues, the domestic total of The Nightmare Before Christmas went from $50m to $75m. Arguably as important as the film's passionate fanbase is its cultural acceptance. It is now no longer Disney's illegitimate child but their proverbial favorite son. The reissues have proudly reclaimed the
If you had told me twenty years ago that Nightmare Before Christmas merchandise would be littering the Disney empire while Jack Skellington would take over the Haunted Mansion every year, I would have thought you mad. Tim Burton is now, for better or worse, a completely kid-tested, parent-approved creator of mainstream bedtime stories. Alice In Wonderland brought Disney $1 billion in 2010 and they thanked him by funding a remake of his animated short, Frankenweenie, that got him fired from Disney in the early 1980's. The film was a bright spot during a dark period for Mr. Burton, coming after the Batman Returns backlash and before the financial failure of Ed Wood and before the critical/artistic failure of
Of course, Burton roared back to life in 1999 with the $100m+ R-rated Sleepy Hollow, and he's been on solid ground ever since. But 1993-198 represented that five-year period when no one was sure if the man who changed the industry with Batman was more than a temporary flavor of the month. Today The Nightmare Before Christmas is arguably more popular than ever, with the generations who grew up on it passing it down to their children like the spooky bedtime story it was always intended to be.
Due to its insanely catchy Danny Elfman songs, undervalued direction by Henry Sellick (who went on to craft the even better and truly terrifying Coraline in 2009), and one-of-a-kind visual imagery, along with containing just enough fright and horror to make kids think they're getting away with something, The Nightmare Before Christmas has, over 20 years, become exactly the kind of perennial holiday favorite that it was inspired by. I can think of no happier ending.
