Warner Bros.
“Beetlejuice Beetlejuice” is a movie decades in the making, with the original being a rare highly successful ’80s movie that didn’t immediately span a sequel — even if it did actually get a follow-up of sorts in the form of a cartoon series. It’s not like Burton is aversed to making sequels, as he did make two “Batman” movies. Still, it’s taken 36 years, but at least now we are finally getting a new “Beetlejuice,” with cast both new and old — through some convincing.
As obvious as the sequel seems, it actually took a lot of effort and time for it to be made, and it wasn’t until the success of “Wednesday” on Netflix that Burton’s interest in a sequel became reinvigorated. During a recent press day attended by /Film’s Jacob Hall, Tim Burton answered questions from a group of journalists, and reflected on the decades wait before making “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice” and how that only made the film more personal to him.
It started and ended with the character of Lydia, and Burton’s desire to revisit the character decades later. “Well, what happened to this person 35 years later? It’s a bit, like 35 up,” Burton said. “You go from cool teenager to what? Some kind of f****d up adult or whatever. And what relationships do you have? Whether you have kids? What’s your relationship with that?” He continued, “So it’s not something I could have done back then.”
“It’s only something you could do once you’d experienced those things yourself,” Burton admitted. “So for me, this became a very personal movie, like kind of a weird family movie, about a weird family, or a weird family movie, or I don’t know which way you want to look at it.”
Tim Burton couldn’t have made Beetlejuice Beetlejuice until now
Warner Bros.
That is honestly the most exciting thing Burton could have said about why he wanted to make the movie. One of the worst decisions made in “Star Wars: The Force Awakens,” which many similar legacy sequels do, is to stagnate its legacy characters. Having Han Solo not only continuing to be a smuggler in his 70s, but wearing exactly the same clothes (with a slightly different jacket) is not just boring, but a betrayal of the character’s original arc. That Burton wanted to have Lydia grow up, and then interrogate how she may have changed in adulthood is a terrific idea — and part of the premise of one of the best anime movies ever, “Only Yesterday.”
According to Burton, it was only after becoming an adult, a parent, that he could properly tackle this particular story. “It’s only time can show you in your own experience in life,” he said. “It’s like when I made ‘Big Fish,’ I couldn’t have made that film before my father died. I could only make that having those feelings that surprised me. So it’s the same with this.”
In an exclusive interview with /Film and Hall, Winona Ryder talked about how young Lydia would react to her grown-up version. “I never pictured Lydia either having children or in any type of relationship. I just always thought she was just probably in her own world as she got older,” Ryder said. “And so that was the big challenge was, who is she now?” Ryder continued, “We’ve all been in those things where you’re just like, what was I thinking, in terms of the relationship I have?”
Fans will get to see a grown-up Lydia Deetz and the return of the ghost with the most when “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice” arrives in theaters on September 6, 2024.