Tim Burton’s long road to making Beetlejuice Beetlejuice

Michael Keaton is back as Beetlejuice in Tim Burton’s long-awaited sequel — 36 years after the original film was released.

The actor reprises his role as the ghost with the most in Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, which also stars Winona Ryder, Catherine O’Hara, Jenna Ortega and Willem Dafoe.

The sequel to the 1988 original will finally materialise on 6 September, but why has it taken so long to reach the big screen? Here is everything you need to know.

Tim Burton’s long journey to make Beetlejuice Beetlejuice

Ideas for Beetlejuice 2 go way back to 1990 when Burton reportedly hired the help of Mars Attacks! screenwriter Jonathan Gems to pen a sequel entitled Beetlejuice Goes Hawaiian.

Gems later told horror movie mag Fangoria: “Tim thought it would be funny to match the surfing backdrop of a beach movie with some sort of German Expressionism, because they’re totally wrong together.”

Plot-wise, this undeveloped follow-up was said to follow Lydia in Hawaii where her parents are hoping to open a resort before Beetlejuice returns, foils their plans and wins a surfing contest using supernatural magic. Thankfully, this exotic sequel never panned out, with Burton instead shifting his focus onto 1992’s Batman Returns instead.

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Speaking of all these false starts, Burton later explained: “We talked about lots of different things... That was early on when we were going, Beetlejuice and the Haunted Mansion, Beetlejuice Goes West, whatever. Lots of things came up.”

That’s not to say the director gave up on the concept though. Over the years, a number of writers were hired to retool the same idea, including Clerks director Kevin Smith before Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter scribe Seth Grahame-Smith was hired to dream up an entirely new vision for Beetlejuice Beetlejuice.

Having previously worked with Burton on his 2012 Dark Shadows adaptation, Grahame-Smith was reportedly determined to write a film that wasn’t just a cash-in exercise and even met with Keaton to discuss returning to the role.

“We talked for a couple of hours and talked about big-picture stuff. It’s a priority for Warner Bros. It’s a priority for Tim. [Michael’s] been wanting to do it for 20 years and he’ll talk to anybody about it who will listen,” he told Shock Till You Drop in a since-archived interview.

This new idea was reportedly set in real-time, 26 or 27 years after the events of 1988’s original. Ryder threw further fuel on the sequel speculation fire in 2013, telling The Daily Beast that: “I’m kind of sworn to secrecy but it sounds like it might be happening. It’s 27 years later. And I have to say, I love Lydia Deetz so much.”

However, despite promising statements from Grahame-Smith, Ryder and Burton in the years following, the project remained unmade and was ultimately shelved for good in 2019.

This changed in early 2022 when Brad Pitt’s company Plan B Entertainment announced that Beetlejuice Beetlejuice was back from the dead. Not long after, Burton teased his return — and the project finally began shooting in summer 2023.

Speaking at the 2024 Venice Film Festival, the director admitted he had become “a little bit disillusioned” with the film industry in recent years. But he became “re-energised” by working with Ortega on Netflix series Wednesday, paving the way for Beetlejuice Beetlejuice.

“I realised the only way to be a success is that I have to love doing it,” he said. “For this one, I just enjoyed and loved making it. I was not out to do a big sequel for money. I wanted to make this for very personal reasons.”

Beetlejuice Beetlejuice will be released on Friday, 6 September.