The Weinstein has released the first trailer for Tim Burton’s upcoming movie Big Eyes, a biopic about the Keane art empire focusing on faux-kitsch paintings of people with large anime eyes.
Big Eyes is Burton’s first drama since 2003’s Big Fish, but has no relation to the movie. From the look of the trailer, Big Eyes will focus on marketing and ownership, as well as sexist perceptions of art. A character states “woman art doesn’t sell,” setting the stage for the art to be marketed as being made by a man.
Tim Burton previously teamed up with writers Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski for Ed Wood. They are also known for the biopics The People vs Larry Flynt, Man on the Moon, and the non-biopic comedy Problem Child. Hopefully, this will be a change of pace for Burton, returning him to more mature works after Alice in Wonderland and Dark Shadows.
The trailer suffers from being overly reliant on overly sweetened indie tropes and is edited to look like any number of generic movies, but the cinematography in some of the individual shots belie Burton’s sensibility. Hopefully the movie is better than the trailer.