"L’exposition de la Cinémathèque a fermé ses portes le 5 août, après avoir accueilli 352 371 visiteurs depuis son ouverture le 7 mars 2012. “Tim Burton, l’exposition” marque ainsi un record pour l’établissement français, « aucune de nos expositions, depuis l’installation à Bercy en 2005, n’avait accueilli autant de monde », avait précisé en juillet Serge Toubiana, le directeur général. Programmer un cinéaste à l’univers si particulier, mais autant populaire, a aussi permis à la Cinémathèque d’ouvrir ses portes à un nouveau public  : « ce qui frappe, poursuit-il, c’est la jeunesse et l’enthousiasme des visiteurs venus de Paris, mais aussi de toute la France et de l’étranger. Parmi ces milliers de visiteurs, nombre d’entre eux ont découvert la Cinémathèque à cette occasion."

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Two years ago the Museum of Modern Art’s retrospective exhibition devoted to the art, animation, and films of Tim Burton set a new attendance record for the institution, and it’s on track to do the same for Paris’s Cinémathèque française, the latest in a string of international museums to host the hugely popular exhibition.

“Tim Burton,” which closes August 5, has brought in 300,000 visitors since it opened on March 7, an unprecedented figure for the film-centric institution, according to a Cinémathèque announcement. Saturday will mark the last of the exhibition’s late-night openings, when the Cinémathèque stays open until 1am in order to provide additional hours for eager visitors, a ploy employed with great success by the Metropolitan Museum during last year’s blockbuster Alexander McQueen exhibition.

“What’s most striking,” said director Serge Toubiana, “is the youth and enthusiasm of the visitors coming from Paris, all over France, and abroad. Among these thousands of visitors, many are coming to the Cinémathèque for the first time.”

The exhibition’s 300,000 visitors in Paris, while undeniably impressive, nonetheless pales in comparison to the 810,500 who saw it at MoMA, making it the museum’s third-best attended show ever.

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— Tim Burton

“Richard’s death is a terrible tragedy and a loss for our industry. As a producer, he was known for his passion, his vision, and his astounding body of work. He has always been an ardent supporter of the Producer’s Guild. He was a dear friend to us and we will miss him deeply.”

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Surprisingly, Beetlejuice 2 is not something he’s jumping on right away.  The other day, Tim Burton told us he’s waiting on the writer’s take on the sequel.  But it appears Grahame-Smith has some other things he needs to tackle first.

“Everyone is waiting for me to get my ass in gear,” Grahame-Smith said.  ”I just finished a script called Night of the Living, and I’m giving it to Tim this weekend.  And I’m moving now into adapting Unholy Night, which I have to deliver to Warner Bros.  I’ve got to do this, then I’m going around the world for Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, so I’ll be writing Unholy Night on the plane and in hotel rooms.”

When we last reported on Night of the Living, I speculated that the plot could be a unique twist on Night of the Living Dead, except that the humans were a threat to the zombies and not vice versa.

Smith said with a smile:  ”[It’s] not just zombies.  Let me put it this way, Tim and I are big fans of classic movie monsters.  The title pretty much where you’re going to be at.  Plus, it’s a Tim Burton stop motion-animated movie.  That movie for me is my love letter to all of the movies I grew up on.”

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Dark Shadows has this Beetlejuice vibe going for it. So of course, I want to know: where will you take Beetlejuice?

All I know at this point is everyone is waiting for me. It’s in my court right now, in terms of getting a story together that gets Tim and gets Michael [Keaton] interested. One thing I have said repeatedly, and I will say it to you, is that nothing would be worse than to be the guy who ruined one of my favorite movies by making a shitty sequel. I know in some of my fiction, I tread on hallowed ground, but this is not something I am going into lightly. It is not something that is worth making just because we can make it. It has to be worthy.

It would be Michael as Beetlejuice; no one else. It would not be a reboot or a remake; it would be an actual sequel. And the number of years between the two films would be the number of years that pass between the two stories. That said, I am interested in getting more of the people from the original film back in some form or another, but right now I am working on several shapes of the story. If one of them is the one that gets everyone super-excited, then that’s the one I will write the script for.

Have you talked to Winona Ryder yet?

No, I haven’t talked to her yet. The only people I’ve talked to directly about it are Warner Bros., Tim Burton, and Michael Keaton. We’ve all met about it; we’ve all talked, and we are all in the same place. In theory, it would be great, but the story has to be really killer.

I applaud that. And I appreciate a sequel instead of a reboot. A reboot just seems lazy.

I call it The Son of the Mask principle. Don’t make a sequel without your original star, and don’t do something just because it is commercially appealing. Do something because it has some artistic merit, and because it has a reason for being, other than just cashing in on someone’s favorite movie.

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I’m definitely curious about Easter Eggs. One of the things that people love about Men in Black and Men in Black 2 is you have a lot of cameos, you have a lot of little winks about celebrities and also little Easter Egg things. How conscious were you to make sure you had these little Easter Eggs in Men in Black 3, or little nods that would get that laugh from the crowd?

Sonnenfeld: Well, we’ve always had in Men in Black headquarters, alien surveillance, so one of the joys is deciding who you would put up on the board, who you would tell the world are aliens. And A) the challenge is you have to get permission from these celebrities and B) you don’t want to go with people that are either a flash in the pan, or political, or people that then in 10 years no one will know who you’re talking about. In fact, in Addams Family Values, which I directed, there is a joke about Amy Fisher, and if you watch it today you’ll go, “I don’t know why that’s funny.” But when we shot the movie, she was the girlfriend of [Joey] Buttafuoco and shot his wife and it was a big moment in the news back then that no longer seems particularly funny or relevant. So the challenge is getting celebrities that are famous, will give you permission and won’t be like, “Who’s that guy?” in ten years. So that’s one thing, the alien surveillance board that we’ve had in all three movies. The first movie I know we had [Steven] Spielberg, Danny DeVito, George Lucas, [Sylvester] Stallone, Isaac Mizrahi, my baby daughter. I can’t remember who we had in the second one, but in this one there are a few people that you’ll see up on the surveillance board including Lady Gaga, Tim Burton, who probably knows more about aliens then I do, and let’s see who else … Justin Bieber … oh, I think in the second one we had Martha Stewart and Michael Jackson.

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THR: The movie rights to Unholy Night have been optioned. When might we see that on the big screen and what do you have coming up next?

SGS: My company is producing it with Heyday David Heyman’s company and its the next the script on my docket to write. I’m right in the middle of writing an animated movie for Tim Burton right now called Night of the Living.

THR:  Weren’t you going to do a movie set in the a cemetery?

SG-S:That’s Living in the Necropolis, which is a book we optioned and have a writer on now. Night of the Living is an idea I have had around for years that I’m doing with Tim Burton. When we were shooting Dark Shadows last year I worked up the nerve to tell Tim about it because I always thought it would make a good movie. When I saw what he had done with Frankweenie and Corpse Bride, it always struck me as a great idea for that form. I’m writing it at Warner’s Bros. for him (as a stop-motion monster movie). As soon I’m done with that draft, I’ll move into Unholy Night, probably in a matter of weeks. Once we have a script and we’ll get together with David Heyman and the studio, we’ll go looking for a director.

THR: Where does Beetlejuice fit in your schedule?

SGS:The Beetlejuice sequel will come after Unholy Night in my schedule. The first opportunity to tackle that will probably be later this year. 

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