In the 1990s, Tim Burton almost told audiences to say cheese and die with a Goosebumps movie. While a film based on the popular horror series for young readers would eventually splatter monster blood on filmgoers in 2015, writer R.L. Stine recently revealed that a Tim Burton Goosebumps movie was a real possibility in the mid-90s, but never came to pass.
In the 1990s, Tim Burton was at the height of goth lord glory. The ’90s were also a prime time for R.L. Stine’s Goosebumps series, with the children’s author pumping out multiple books a year – books that would then fly off the shelves and be consumed by young voracious readers. Pairing Stine with Burton in the ’90s seems like a no-brainer, and it almost happened. Speaking with CinemaBlend, Stine revealed he had a deal in the ’90s with Fox for a Goosebumps movie that Burton was going to produce:
“We had a movie deal to do a Goosebumps movie, and I can’t tell you what year it was…It was like at the height of Goosebumps, back in ’94, ’95, around there, and we actually had a deal with Fox to do a movie, and Tim Burton who was going to be the producer. We had a big meeting, and I thought, ‘Oh, that’ll be great. Tim Burton and Goosebumps. It’ll be great.’ And we had a nice meeting with him, and we had a great time and we talked about what we should do, and then nothing happened.”
Why didn’t the Burton-produced Goosebumps movie ever get off the ground? It seems that Burton’s infamous, never-made Superman Lives, a film the filmmaker worked on for years, with Nicolas Cage set to star as the Man of Steel, might be to blame:
“He got involved in some Superman project (Superman Lives, starring Nicolas Cage) that also never happened. He was going to do Superman, and then we never heard from him again. That was the end of it. I think we were going to do a new story, but use some of the elements. But we never got that far, you know? It’s very strange. I don’t know. People couldn’t figure out for a long time which story to do, what should we do. And then Goosebumps wasn’t as popular, and then it came back.”
When I was younger, I was a huge fan of Goosebumps and Burton’s work, so if this film had happened, I probably would’ve lost my freakin’ mind. Alas, it was not to be. Burton would go on to turn into something of a parody of himself, and Stine would continue to pump out books at an alarming rate. In 2015, Rob Letterman helmed a Goosebumps movie, which was surprisingly entertaining. But now I’ll always wonder how the Tim Burton Goosebumps might have turned out.
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