The ‘ghost with the most’ sequel: Why an authentic Beetlejuice sequel is nowhere to be seen

Words by Jessica Pittendreigh

This article contains spoiler content.

Tim Burton can be defined by his eccentric (later coined ‘Burtonesque’) visual style, kooky characters and whimsical fantasy stories. At the time of shooting Beetlejuice, his career was still so small that lead actress, Winona Ryder, mistook him for a fellow actor during auditions. The film was met with huge critical and commercial success, grossing around $75 million and established Burton as a fresh auteur director who managed to provide a sense of childlike wonder within the gothic fantasy worlds he created.

Beetlejuice itself was co-written as a resistance against the scripts Burton was receiving to direct; a bid to stand out, to push generic boundaries.  

Naturally, when the sequel was teased on Late Night with Seth Myers in the autumn of 2015 by a bright-eyed Winona Ryder, raving about the film’s purity within an industry of CGI, expectations were high.

However, despite its smash box office success (grossing around $404 million and counting since its release in early September) no matter how many times you say its name, a true Burtonian Beetlejuice sequel is nowhere to be seen. What remains is imitative, oversaturated and expurgated; a money-grab by Warner Bros., intent on cramming ‘Gen Z’ humour into a 36-year-old narrative, but the problems don’t end there. 

During initial discussions, Burton and his team projected a budget of roughly $147 million. In an interview with Scott Detrow for NPR, Burton said his focus was on reconnecting to the love of practically making movies. He wanted puppets, live sets, practical effects and improv-based acting, all to be enjoyed as a spectacle in the movie theatre. However, Motion Picture Group co-chairs Michael De Luca and Pamela Abdy, who took over Warner Bros. in 2022, had other ideas. Burton’s projected budget of $147 million was slashed by $50 million to save the film from being sent straight to Max for streaming.

Though disagreements were smoothed out, the studio’s overfocus on profit and marketability continued to ooze into every other aspect of the film and seems to have bled it dry of authenticity.  

The problem first starts to show with the casting; an overuse of household name actors like Willem Dafoe, Jenna Ortega and Monica Bellucci lead to a convoluted story with multiple unnecessary plot points (killer ex-wife subplot – I’m looking at you). These are jammed in purely to splatter recognisable faces across the film’s poster-promised screen-time.

The rumours of a real script draft called ‘Beetlejuice Goes Hawaiian’ suddenly feel uncomfortably present in the finished product. There may be no Hawaii, but there are terse familial relations, re-marriage, grief, more grief, a return to a haunted hometown, angsty teen romance, a killer ex-wife… the list goes on, despite the run time only racking up to an hour and 44 minutes.  

This web of endless subplots is dragged along by equally ‘humdrum’ pacing. The film’s drawn-out exposition serves more as an attempt to convince die-hard fans of the bizarre permutation in the characterisation of Lydia Deetz – a once outlandish protagonist, now diluted into a ‘tiktokable soft goth’ archetype, suitable for kids!

The same issue extends to Jenna Ortega’s character, Lydia’s brooding daughter, Astrid. Even though she fits into the narrative and provides a convincing, and at times comedic, performance, it’s clear she was cast more in the interest of drawing in a younger audience curated by trendy Netflix show Wednesday than for finding a genuine fit for the role. Astrid feels no different to any of Ortega’s other dry witted, nihilistic characters, and with any development that’s made (most notably during the undead reunion with her deceased father played by Santiago Cabrera) the bizarre and borderline laughable ending undercuts her arc entirely. 

The frantic pace with which Burton claimed to enjoy shooting at seems only to creep up in the film’s latter half. Its saving grace momentarily flurries in with Michael Keaton’s late entrance, providing a nostalgic relief. Unfortunately, any long-lasting impact disappears shortly after as – despite being the franchises’ face – Keaton only serves audiences 17 minutes of screen time and disappears as quickly as he appears.

Although writers Alfred Gough and Miles Millar self-professed it a deliberate choice to focus on quality over quantity with the character of Betelgeuse, a concerning amount of Keaton’s screen time is swallowed by the film’s transformation into a full-blown musical. As predicted, he offers a skilful and nostalgic performance, with his occasional politically incorrect joke always falling flat. As for his character it remains entirely unchanged, wearing Betelgeuse’s sentimentality away ever so slightly.  

Perhaps I write with a nostalgic desire for a simpler time. After all, the sequel has acclaimed huge commercial and critical success, with a score of 77% by critics on Rotten Tomatoes and 80% by the audience. As Adam Blevins asserts in Collider magazine, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice marks Tim Burton’s return to box office form, with the film currently standing at the #5 spot on the highest-grossing comedies of all time at the domestic box office.

Aesthetically too, it retains the quirkiness of its predecessor, with production recreating the original film’s practical approach to special effects, live sets, puppets, and strictly no CGI. While there is an overfilled cast, the actors are reliable and help bring the widely appraised storyline to life. Undeniably then, Beetlejuice’s successor continues to beg the age-old question: does the director know best? Only time will tell.  

3/5