Michael Keaton starring. 2020s In February 2021, it was announced that Burton would be directing and producing Wednesday, a series for Netflix based on the titular character from The Addams Family. This marked Burton's first foray into directing television since the 1980s. He helmed four episodes in the first season, which began production in September 2021 for a November 2022 release. Unrealized projects After Kevin Smith had been hired to write a new Superman film, he suggested Burton to direct. Burton came on and Warner Bros. set a theatrical release date for the summer of 1998, the 60th anniversary of the character's debut in Action Comics. Nicolas Cage was signed on to play Superman, Burton hired Wesley Strick to rewrite Smith's script, and the film entered pre-production in June 1997. For budgetary reasons, Warner Bros. ordered another rewrite from Dan Gilroy, delayed the film, and ultimately put it on hold in April 1998. Burton then left to direct Sleepy Hollow. Burton has depicted the experience as a difficult one, citing differences with producer Jon Peters and the studio, stating, "I basically wasted a year. A year is a long time to be working with somebody that you don't really want to be working with." In 2001, The Walt Disney Company began to consider producing a sequel to The Nightmare Before Christmas, but rather than using stop motion, Disney wanted to use computer animation. Burton convinced Disney to drop the idea. "I was always very protective of ['Nightmare'], not to do sequels or things of that kind," Burton explained. "You know, 'Jack visits Thanksgiving world' or other kinds of things, just because I felt the movie had a purity to it and the people that like it... Because it's a mass-market kind of thing, it was important to kind of keep that purity of it." Regardless, in 2009, Henry Selick stated that he could make a sequel to Nightmare if he and Burton could create a good story for it. In 2012, Shane Acker confirmed that Burton would work with Valve to create his next animated feature film, Deep. Like 9, the film would take place in a post-apocalyptic world (although set in a different universe). Deep would be another darker animated film, as Shane Acker has expressed his interest in creating more PG-13 animated films. Since then, there have been no further mentions of Deep, with Acker focusing on another