Steven Spielberg Almost Hired Tim Burton to Direct GREMLINS

This holiday season, a classic Christmas movie that might be on your list is the 1984 horror fantasy comedy, Gremlins, from writer Chris Columbus and director Joe Dante. It’s a fun cult classic that still has a thriving fanbase, but it almost looked quite different.

Steven Spielberg was a producer on the film, and as it turns out, when he read the script, he had an up-and-coming director in mind to take the job. That is, after he reluctantly passed on it. According to an Oral History of Gremlins put out by cutprintfilm, Spielberg wanted to make the movie when he first read it, but it wasn’t going to work out. He went on the hunt for the right director, and he almost landed on Tim Burton.

Burton had been working for Disney throughout the early 1980s, serving as a concept artist on films like The Fox and the Hound and The Black Cauldron. While working at Disney, Burton made his stop-motion animated short called Vincent, narrated by Vincent Price, and directed a live-action TV version of Hansel and Gretel for the Disney channel. It was Burton's live-action short film Frankenweenie, however, that caught Spielberg's eye. 

While he loved the style of Burton’s work, his only holdup was that the young filmmaker had not yet made a feature film, so he defaulted back to Joe Dante, who ended up directing.

I think that Gremlins would have been a perfect match for Burton, but he went on to make Pee Wee’s Big Adventure the next year, and then Beetlejuice, Batman, and Edward Scissorhands in quick succession, so it all worked out for the best.

via: /Film