Director Henry Selick suggested an alternate ending for The Nightmare Before Christmas that would have changed much of the movie, and Tim Burton unsurprisingly hated it. While it’s widely misunderstood that Tim Burton directed The Nightmare Before Christmas, the real man behind the camera was Henry Selick. Burton had originally planned on directing the movie since the story was inspired by characters of a poem he wrote while working at Disney in 1982, but decided on being a producer due to prior commitments with Batman Returns (1992) and dreading the painstakingly tedious process of stop-motion animation.

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The Nightmare Before Christmas follows Jack Skellington, the Pumpkin King of Halloween Town, as he becomes bored with his annual routine and unsuspectingly stumbles into the cheerful Christmas Town. Jack quickly becomes obsessed with Christmas and works on transforming his spooky home into the North Pole, forcibly taking over the business from Santa Claus. The 1993 animated movie ends with Jack saving Sally and Santa from the gambling Oogie Boogie, who he defeats by pulling the string that keeps him together, revealing that the bogeyman was made of bugs that soon dissolve and scatter him into nothing.

According to The Holiday Movies That Made Us, Selick had an idea for an alternate ending during production and made the mistake of sharing it with Tim Burton. Selick wanted The Nightmare Before Christmas’s climactic ending to feature the green bogeyman being unraveled to reveal that Sally’s father, Dr. Finkelstein, had been controlling Oogie Boogie from inside the entire time. The Coraline director thought the villain twist would be a “classic Scooby-Doo ending,” and Tim Burton emphatically disagreed. Selick revealed that upon hearing his suggestion, Burton went into a dramatic rage in which he “erupted into a screaming fit” and kicked a hole in Disney’s wall with a boot.

While he wasn’t overly present during the filming process, filmmaker Tim Burton still had a significant amount of creative control and influence over the style and content of the movie. At the end of the day, it was his passion project that he had been planning for a decade before The Nightmare Before Christmas actually moved forward into production. For this reason, it’s clear why Tim Burton would be angry with a suggestion of altering the culmination of a personal film that he was hardly involved with during its making. He shouldn’t have overreacted by screaming at Selick and violently kicking a hole in the wall, but a movie with “Tim Burton’s” in the title should at least keep to the overall story that he conceived.

Additionally, a “Scooby-Doo ending” really isn’t Tim Burton’s gig. As demonstrated in Burton’s filmography, the villain is the villain, so twisting it in the final moments of The Nightmare Before Christmas‘ story would almost cheapen his intentions and style. Clearly, when Tim Burton has an uncompromisable vision of how one of his own stories progresses, nobody can change his mind. On the same episode of The Holiday Movies That Made Us, frequent Tim Burton collaborator Caroline Thompson recalled suggesting another tweak to the ending that Burton also took poorly. Thompson told Burton that Jack and Sally’s relationship could use “another couple of beats” at the ending to feel more earned, and Burton responded by attacking an editing machine. In the end, Tim Burton got the finale he wanted and The Nightmare Before Christmas remains a beloved and spooky holiday classic decades later.

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Jordan Williams
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Jordan Williams is a Movie/TV Feature Senior Staff Writer for Screen Rant. She graduated from the University of Oregon in 2020 with a B.A. in Psychology and a minor in Media Studies.

Jordan is based in Seattle, Washington and enjoys exploring the natural beauty the PNW has to offer. She runs on coffee and classic movies, taking pride in having watched every film on AFI’s 100 Greatest Films list and every Best Picture Oscar winner.

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