Tim Burton's '90s Box Office Bomb Is Way Better Than People Gave It Credit For At The Time

Tim Burton had a hell of a run in the ‘80s and early ‘90s. He fired off hit after hit...until Mars Attacks!. The movie with an all-star cast and some really funny aliens bombed at the box office, but it didn’t deserve to. In fact, I would say it’s one of Burton’s best movies. It had a reported budget of around $80 million, not including marketing, and it made about $100 million in theaters. That's not the worst performance, but it almost certainly lost a lot of money, something a Burton film rarely does.

At The Time, It Was Crushed By Critics

In his 1996 review of the movie, Roger Ebert wrote: “Mars Attacks! plays like one of those ’50s movies that are *not* remembered as cult classics.” Rita Kempley at the Washington Post said it was “aimlessly plotted and blandly written.”

Review after review panned the tribute to ‘50s sci-fi movies. That was reflected, obviously, in the middling-to-poor box office receipts. Over the years, however, critics have come around. Burton, unsurprisingly, was ahead of his time. If the critics weren’t ready for it then, more modern critiques have been much kinder to the film, and it’s deserving of that. Very deserving.

Mars Attacks! Is A Great Movie

If you take yourself back to 1996, Burton was at the height of his powers in Hollywood. Starting with his first movie, Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure in 1985, he made one great film after another. A list including Beetlejuice, Batman, and Edward Scissorhands, the latter of which kicked off a long working relationship with Johnny Depp. It really seemed like the quirky director with a look and style all his own couldn’t be stopped.

Then, in 1994, he hit his first bump in the road with Ed Wood. That film, a biopic of the legendary B-movie director, was a small-budget movie that generated modest box office receipts. Mars Attacks! followed in 1996 and was his first legitimate bomb.

It shouldn’t be remembered for that (and isn’t). Burton enlisted a truly talented roster of actors for the movie that included up-and-comers like Natalie Portman and Lukas Haas. This was alongside some of Hollywood’s most established talent, like Michael J. Fox, Glenn Close, Danny DeVito, Sarah Jessica Parker, Annette Bening, Martin Short, and James Bond himself, Pierce Brosnan. It also crucially features Jack Nicholson in one of his most underrated performances in not one, but two roles.

Mars Attacks! is also really funny and just plain fun. It’s completely absurd in all the best ways, and in ways that only a mind like Burton’s could imagine. I’m glad it is well thought of today, because otherwise, it would be another lost classic. Meanwhile, Tim Burton has been busy lately, with last year’s Beetlejuice Beetlejuice and Wednesday, both of which you can watch with a Netflix subscription.