Some twenty years after the launch of the classic 1990s TV show, R.L. Stine’s Goosebumps book series finally made the jump to the big screen in 2015, with Jack Black taking on the role of the prolific children’s horror author for Universal Pictures’ feature film adaptation.
The movie was a hit at the box office, and was followed by this year’s Goosebumps 2: Haunted Halloween, but as Stine has revealed to CinemaBlend, we almost got a movie version of Goosebumps back in the mid-90s – one from the mind of Tim Burton.
“We had a movie deal to do a Goosebumps movie, and I can’t tell you what year it was,” said Stine. “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.”
As for why nothing happened, it turns out that Burton decided to turn his attention to another project that also ultimately failed to see the light of day:
“He got involved in some Superman project [Superman Lives] 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.”
Would you have been interested in seeing Burton’s take on Goosebumps? Let us know in the comments below…
