Tim Burton-Produced Vampire Epic 'Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter' Is Leaving HBO Max

Of all the filmmakers who've made creative pivots in their careers, few have had as drastic a turn as Timur Bekmambetov. The Kazakh director broke out with a couple of vampire movies in Russia before making his big Hollywood debut with the action-packed comic book adaptation Wanted, which grossed nearly $350 million worldwide. The movie introduced him to the mainstream as a filmmaker with an eye for stylized action. However, Bekmambetov has dedicated the last 15 years of his career to an entirely different kind of filmmaking. During this time, he has become something of an authority on "screenlife" films — movies that unfold entirely on digital screens. Earlier this year, Bekmambetov made his Hollywood directorial comeback with Mercy, starring Chris Pratt and Rebecca Ferguson. However, those interested in revisiting his earlier work might want to head over to HBO Max, where his follow-up to Wanted is streaming until the end of the month.

While there were conversations about a sequel to Wanted, Bekmambetov was given a wide berth on his ambitious follow-up project, an adaptation of a novel by Seth Grahame-Smith. The movie was produced by Tim Burton and designed to launch a new franchise, but it underperformed at the box office and received mediocre reviews, putting an end to those plans. The film was released theatrically in 2012, the same year as Quentin Tarantino's spaghetti Western Django Unchained and Steven Spielberg's biographical epic Lincoln, with which it surprisingly shared a few thematic overlaps. It starred Benjamin Walker in the lead role, along with two MCU alums — Dominic Cooper and Anthony Mackie.