When the Museum of Modern Art unveiled its Tim Burton exhibition last November, some skeptics in the art world saw the show as a classic play for crossover museum audiences, taking a page from the Brooklyn Museum's controversial 2002 "Star Wars: The Magic of Myth" and the Guggenheim's 1998 "Art of the Motorcycle" show. Regardless of MoMA's motives, the Burton exhibition has proven a historic crowd-pleaser for the museum, bringing in 810,500 visitors over the course of its run, which ended earlier this week. That tally makes the show the third most popular in the museum's history — behind retrospectives of Matisse in 1992 and Picasso in 1980 — and far and away the most-visited exhibition that the film department, now headed by Rajendra Roy, has produced.

Curated by Roy alongside Ron Magliozzi and Jenny He, the exhibition featured paraphernalia from Burton's Hollywood movies — including the cowl that Michael Keaton wore in the director's 1989 Batman film — as well as preparatory drawings he made for such beloved features as Edward Scissorhands and the Nightmare Before Christmas. The show was the first from the film department to appear in the museum's main galleries, filling the third floor with roughly 700 works, and it was accompanied by a series of movie screenings from Burton's oeuvre in the museum's cinema. Previous film exhibitions at MoMA had been largely confined to the smaller downstairs galleries, including "Pixar: 20 Years of Animation," which opened in 2005, and the 1995 show devoted to Alfred Hitchcock.

The record-breaking show, simply titled "Tim Burton," will now travel to the Australian Center for the Moving Image in June and Toronto's Bell Light Box in November, with one or two more U.S. and European stops in the works. A MoMA representative said there were no immediate plans for a follow-up film exhibition to take place in the museum's main galleries. Standard admission to the museum is $20, and tickets for the Burton show were timed.