Tim Burton has officially spoken out about not wanting more A Nightmare Before Christmas movies, including sequels, prequels or reboots.
The filmmaker told Empire Magazine in a recent interview that the 1993 stop-motion animated film is “very important” to him, which is why he wants to leave it alone.
“I’ve done sequels, I’ve done other things, I’ve done reboots, I’ve done all that shit, right? I don’t want that to happen to this,” Burton said. “It’s nice that people are maybe interested [in another one], but I’m not. I feel like that old guy who owns a little piece of property and won’t sell to the big power-plant that wants to take my land.”
“Get off of my land!” he added in a grumpy voice. “You pesky little… You ain’t getting this property! I don’t care what you want to build on it. You come on my property… Where’s my shotgun?”
A Nightmare Before Christmas, which is from a story created by Burton, follows Jack Skellington, the Pumpkin King of Halloween Town, as he stumbles into Christmas Town. After being so intrigued with the idea of Christmas, he tries to recreate it in his town instead of Halloween.
Burton went on to explain why the Pumpkin King is such a personal character for him, saying he’s a “character that’s perceived as dark, but is really light. Those are the kinds of things that I love, whether it’s [Edward] Scissorhands or Batman, characters that have that. It represented all those feelings that I had. I was perceived as this dark character, when I didn’t feel that way. So it was a very personal character.”
The Wednesday director’s comments come after Nightmare Before Christmas director Henry Selick said last month that the idea of a prequel wasn’t completely off the table.
Though he admitted that he wouldn’t be jumping at making a sequel due to the large amount of work associated with the first film, saying it was “a perfect movie [that] came out of the perfect time, only to grow into something far bigger over the years,” the Coraline director noted that he may be more inclined to do a prequel.
“There might be a more interesting story there about how Jack became the King of Halloween Town,” Selick told People magazine at the time.
The Nightmare Before Christmas is currently streaming on Disney+.
