Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children

Despite dominating the box office last week, The Magnificent Seven took a not-insignificant tumble this weekend, slipping to third place and allowing Miss Peregrine’s Home For Peculiar Children and Deepwater Horizon to claim the top two spots. However, both newcomers opened below expectations, making this an odd capper to a September that was otherwise full of surprise hits.

Tim Burton is one of the most imaginary filmmakers of our time, a man who’s envisioned wacky, gothic, and fantastical worlds. But his imagination is limited when it comes to race.

Tim Burton’s career has experienced wildly diminishing returns in recent years as he slides further into nauseatingly wacky computer-generated excess, with only the occasional glimmer of the gothic whimsy that made him a beloved household name. The good news is that Miss Peregrine’s Home For Peculiar Children is a much better and more restrained film than Dark Shadows or Alice in Wonderland; the bad news is that it’s a somewhat tedious YA adaptation with a half-baked-in metaphor about Burton’s career that might make you feel even more depressed about what it’s become.

Y’know those back to school ads for Staples? The ones that repurpose the Christmas standard “It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year” to celebrate children going back class? I always hated those ads as a kid. Going back to school was not a time to celebrate. It was a time for grief and mourning.

If you’re anything like me, it’s probably been a while since you were really excited for a Tim Burton movie. While movies like Big Eyes, Dark Shadows, and Alice in Wonderland all did either OK with critics or at the box office, Burton has made too many wonderful movies in his career for “OK” to feel like anything other than a disappointment. Thankfully, Burton seems to be back on track with Miss Peregrine’s Home For Peculiar Children, a YA adaptation that brings together the conflict of the X-Men with the sense of childish wonder that only Burton can bring to bear.

Tim Burton has been a bit hit or miss in his later years (to say the least), but his latest film looks like it might possibly, hopefully be the closest thing to a return to form since Frankenweenie. A new featurette encourages that optimism by taking you inside the fantastical world of Miss Peregrine’s Home For Peculiar Children — come for Eva Green, stay for charmingly creepy little kids in burlap sacks.

Ender’s Game sputtered out and he didn’t land the role of Marvel’s new Spider-Man, so Asa Butterfield’s latest stab at franchise immortality will come in Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children. Based on a best-selling novel by Ransom Riggs, the premise is sort of a Tim Burton spin on X-Men, with a house of strange and quirkily gifted children who live apart from society that doesn’t understand their abilities. And, yes, if this movie is a hit, Riggs has already written two Miss Peregrine sequels, Hollow City and Library of Souls. In other words, there’s nothing peculiar about Hollywood’s interest in this material.

Tim Burton’s already made his comic-book movie; 1989’s Batman, which practically invented modern superhero cinema. And his next movie, Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children, is inspired by a novel by Ransom Riggs. But damn if the first trailer doesn’t make it look like Burton’s spin on the X-Men; where he takes the idea of this secret society of outsiders and makes them all vaguely creepy and Victorian and stuff.

Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children just sounds like a Tim Burton movie, doesn’t it? Well, it is.

Although it’s far from an actual trailer (or even a real teaser, for that matter), we do have our first inkling of what’s in store with Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children, Tim Burton’s adaptation of the beloved Ransom Riggs novel of the same name. If you’re a fan of that book, then you’re aware that September 3 (that would be today, guys) has some significance in the story as “Loop Day,” and the first teaser honors it accordingly.