10 Movies That Changed Your Mind About Directors You Hated

6. Frankenweenie - Tim Burton

For some time, Tim Burton was no more than a cliche of himself: making oddities with Johnny Depp and giving a juicy supporting role to his wife Helena Bonham-Carter, as audiences who had loved his earliest works turned off their love affair with his idiosyncratic cookie imagination, and went elsewhere for their silliness. The problem for Burton in the wake of Sleepy Hollow was that his vision wasn't strong enough to paper over the cracks in his story-telling - which had never been an issue with Beetlejuice or Batman - and though he was still populating his movie worlds with delightfully weird characters and brilliantly conceived sets dripping in the nostalgia of half-remembered, sunny childish dreams of suburbia, it was no longer enough. There wasn't enough variation in there for new audiences, and even his most ardent older fans began to suspect that his bit was wearing thin, and that his imagination engine was running on fumes. He had lost it, plain and simple, and box-office results showed as much very tangibly. But then Disney decided to option Frankenweenie, the film that had pretty much got Burton sacked when he made the short that inspired it, and in the comfort of stop motion, the sparkle came back, and Burton's eye for retrospection and aesthetic nostalgia worked very well. His core fans flooded back and new ones were equally dazzled, and hopefully the old charm could hold. Did It Last? Probably not at this stage. Big Eyes seems something of a departure for the director, but everything else he's attached to at the minute looks like the usual, uninspiring cookie stuff he's been making with Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham-Carter for way too long.