Beetlejuice came out in theaters on March 30, 1988, and it has since become a cult classic. The movie, directed by Tim Burton, featured Michael Keaton as the titular character, and also included Winona Ryder, Alec Baldwin, Geena Davis, Catherine O’Hara, and Jeffrey Jones.
Beetlejuice was a huge success, and grossed $74 million at the box office with a modest budget of $15 million. A year after the film was released, the Beetlejuice animated TV series aired, which ran for four seasons from 1989 to 1991. Then in 2018, Beetlejuice The Musical came out. Now, a sequel — titled Beetlejuice Beetlejuice — is coming 36 years after the first movie’s release. But why did it take so long for the second movie to get made?
Michael Keaton talks about the sequel
According to Keaton, the sequel has been a long time coming. He and Burton have been going back to the idea of creating a sequel for several years. However, they both agreed not to rush the initial stages of the project, as they wanted to get it right. They didn’t want to do the sequel just for the sake of having a second movie. “We thought, ‘You got to get this right. Otherwise, just don’t do it. Let’s just go on with our lives and do other things,’” he said in an interview with PEOPLE. He added that both he and Burton had been hesitant, but the idea of making a sequel was always there.
Eventually, they were on the same page and decided that it was time to do it, but both agreed that they didn’t want the Beetlejuice sequel to be full of CGI. They wanted the movie to feel “handmade,” where people operated puppets instead of relying heavily on technology like many films today.
Tim Burton had secret meetings with Winona Ryder
Winona Ryder, who played the character of Lydia Deetz in Beetlejuice, revealed in an interview with Harper’s Bazaar that she had secret meetings with Burton throughout the years to discuss the Beetlejuice sequel. “There were a lot of times my agents didn’t know that I was meeting up with him,” she stated.
It seemed Ryder was positive that the Beetlejuice sequel would happen, but she just didn’t know when. When she was asked to play Joyce Byers in Netflix’s Stranger Things, she agreed on the condition that she would be allowed to take a break from filming and work on Beetlejuice 2 it if happened. And happen it did. Fortunately, Stranger Things was on a break between seasons when Beetlejuice Beetlejuice was filmed.
Tim Burton lost interest in the industry
Before Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, Burton’s last movie was the live-action film Dumbo, released in 2019. The director said in an interview that he had “sort of lost interest in the movie industry.”
“I felt like I’d had enough with studios. I’d had enough of all this kind of stuff.”
Burton instead focused his attention on the Netflix series Wednesday, wherein he served as an executive producer and director of four of the eight episodes in season 1. Working on the series inspired him to back to making films, particularly the Beetlejuice sequel. Wednesday writers Miles Millar and Alfred Gough also wrote the screenplay for the long-awaited Beetlejuice sequel.
In 2021, Seth Grahame-Smith, who had been initially hired to write for the sequel, told Collider that it had been difficult to get the movie going because it’s a “very fine needle to thread… there are 10 million ways to get that sequel wrong and four ways to get it right,” he added. Filming of the sequel began in May 2023, and by March 2024, a rough edit had been completed.
The sequel became more than just a follow-up to the first movie. For Burton, it became personal. He revealed that he had a connection with the character of Lydia, and he wanted to show how the character had developed throughout the decades. “Sometimes, as you get older, you lose yourself a little bit,” the director said. Since the first movie, he said he has made good films and bad films, and the feelings he had toward all the changes in his life were the reasons he felt the need to push forward with creating the sequel. “I identified with Lydia back then, and I identify with her now,” he said.
Michael Keaton, Winona Ryder, and Catherine O’Hara will reprise their roles as Beetlejuice, Lydia Deetz, and Delia Deetz, respectively. Other stars included in the cast are Jenna Ortega, Justin Theroux, Monica Bellucci, and Willem Dafoe. Beetlejuice Beetlejuice hits theaters on Sept. 6, 2024.