Sightlines · reception

How Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street was received

2007 · Tim Burton · Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street on Sightlines

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 theater 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 humor 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 favorite 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.

Did you know? Stephen Sondheim had casting approval and signed off on Johnny Depp before ever hearing him properly sing — Depp, who'd never sung professionally, secretly recorded demos with his old bandmate Bruce Witkin to prove he could pull it off.

A Deleuzian reading of Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street →