Nightmare Before Christmas Was Once Relegated To Disney's Animation 'Morgue'
When Henry Selick's animated fantasy "The Nightmare Before Christmas" was first released in October of 1993, it wasn't an overwhelming hit. Made for a budget of $20 million, the film only opened to about $191,000 in its first weekend. It would eventually crawl its way to a respectable but not mind-blowing $50 million overall. Disney, the film's distributor, clearly had little faith in the project and released it under its Touchstone label, feeling it was too weird for little kids. Only a small segment of passionate teenage Tim Burton fans latched onto it (Burton designed the film and wrote the poem on which the script is based), and it was the weirdos and Goths who bought it on VHS and committed the film to memory. For a few brief, sweet years, "Nightmare" was little more than a legitimate cult phenomenon.
Something happened by the late 1990s, however, as Disney slowly discovered that marketing "Nightmare Before Christmas" merch to the Hot Topic crowd was a massive moneymaking opportunity. Thanks to a growing rapidly growing tchotchke market, it didn't take too long before "Nightmare" spread its way into the mainstream. Sally stockings could be bought in every mall. Disney re-branded the film under the Disney label (a telling move indeed) and began re-releasing it annually. The Haunted Mansion attraction of Disneyland is now redesigned every year to incorporate "Nightmare" characters and iconography. In the last 30 years, "Nightmare" moved from being an oddity to being overexposed.
In David A. Bossert's new anniversary book "Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas Visual Companion," Burton recalled how the film was initially and venomously rejected by Disney, and how its concept art was filed away in the innocuously named Disney Research Library, a building Burton likened to a morgue.
The Disney morgue
The story of "The Nightmare Before Christmas" stretched back into the 1980s, a time when Disney was struggling to stay afloat. Several of the studio's more recent animated films flopped incredibly hard, notably "The Fox and the Hound" and "The Black Cauldron," two films that Tim Burton worked on as an animator or designer. The studio, because of these flops, was stretching into broader fare, putting out films like "Something Wicked This Way Comes." Older readers might even recall the earnest rumors that Disney was to shutter its animation department altogether. Right up until "The Little Mermaid" came along, anyway.
In was during the '80s that Burton made his stop-motion animated short "Vincent," a tribute to Vincent Price. Two years later, Burton came out with his live-action short "Frankenweenie," a film about a resurrected dog. Burton was odd to be sure, but Disney was in no position to reject his pitches. Burton suggested his oft-rejected-by-publishers storybook "The Nightmare Before Christmas" about a Halloween skeleton who finds himself enamored with Christmas after traveling from Halloween Town to Christmas Town by mistake. Burton drew a lot of gangly, weird pictures, which Disney, he found, wasn't fond of. Burton recalled that after being rejected by publishers, "I looked at it and thought of it as a half-hour animated TV thing," leading to his Disney pitch. The company suggested making it with the Canadian animated studio Nelvana, "But, I just said no, it's got to be stop-motion. That's part of what it is: stop-motion."
Disney, Burton recalled, whisked up all his drawings and stored them away in their archive almost immediately. This was a clear sign to Burton that the project was on ice, just like Walt's severed head. The archive, he said, was the "morgue."
The Tim Burton Blues Explosion
With "Nightmare" in cold storage, Burton began to reach out to other studios. Luckily, studios in the mid-'80s and early '90s were willing to take risks on an oddball like Burton, and in a seven-year period, from 1985 to 1992, Burton came out with "Pee-wee's Big Adventure," "Beetlejuice," "Batman," "Edward Scissorhands," and "Batman Returns." The Burton aesthetic became one of the dominating looks in pop media, and the director proved to be a legitimate hit-maker. Armed with that clout, Burton wanted to put "The Nightmare Before Christmas" back into production somewhere on that timeline; it was a project that Burton had never forgotten about.
Luckily, Disney still had all the old artwork in their morgue. They opened up the freezer, as it were, extracted the assets, and got started.
It's also notable that Michael Eisner was put in charge of Disney back in 1984, and he oversaw a massive Disney Renaissance at the same time Burton was rising in popularity. From 1989 to 1992, Disney put out the massive hits "The Little Mermaid," "Beauty and the Beast," and "Aladdin." Eisner, it seems, was willing to take a chance on their old employee and gave Burton the control he wanted over the project. Henry Selick was hired to direct and a worthy successor to "Mad Monster Party" was born.
It took a few years, but "Nightmare" also eventually became one of the company's bigger hits. It can still be seen in theaters to this day. Very occasionally, Disney would also hire Burton to direct some of its projects, including the beloved 1994 bomb "Ed Wood," the massive 2010 hit "Alice in Wonderland," the animated 2012 remake of "Frankenweenie," and the utterly fascinating 2019 remake of "Dumbo."