Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street · reception & legacy
2007 · Tim Burton
How Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street has been received, argued over, and remembered.
The arc
A critical hit in 2007 — Depp took the Golden Globe and an Oscar nod for it — but its reputation has shifted with hindsight: it's now widely eulogised as the last genuinely great Burton–Depp collaboration before the partnership curdled into self-parody.
What's debated
The forever-war is over the singing: musical theatre fans still argue whether casting non-singers Depp and Bonham Carter over Broadway belters was inspired intimacy or Sondheim sacrilege.
Its footprint
'Attend the tale of Sweeney Todd' and the meat-pie gallows humour endure, but its biggest cultural afterlife is aesthetic — the film is a load-bearing pillar of 2007 emo/goth Tumblr iconography, endlessly screencapped and Halloween-costumed.
Where it stands
A nostalgic Letterboxd favourite that doubles as a generational gateway drug — for a lot of millennials it was their first Sondheim, and the 'last good Burton movie' discourse keeps it in constant rotation.