Santa Claus in film Another recent devious mall Santa was played by Billy Bob Thornton in "Bad Santa" (2003), a film which gained normally family-friendly Disney "bad press". Tim Burton's stop-action animated musical film, "The Nightmare Before Christmas" (1993), depicts Jack Skellington, the Pumpkin King of Halloween Town, wanting to become Santa Claus after an accidental visit to Christmas Town. After the mostly well-meaning but clueless Halloween citizens capture Santa, they try to take over Christmas with disastrous results; the real Santa is almost killed by the Oogie Boogie Man. Santa is voiced here by Ed Ivory, and in the video game spin-offs, Corey
Tim Burton of the film helped establish Burton as a profitable director, and it proved to be a huge influence on future superhero films, which eschewed the bright, all-American heroism of Richard Donner's "Superman" for a grimmer, more realistic look and characters with more psychological depth. It also became a major inspiration for the successful 1990s cartoon "", in as much as the darkness of the picture and its sequel allowed for a darker Batman on television. Burton claimed that the graphic novel "" was a major influence on his film adaptation of "Batman": I was never a giant comic book fan,