In review: 'Beetlejuice Beetlejuice'

Why 'Batman' is the 'Beetlejuice' sequel's true predecessor.

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Before we discuss Beetlejuice Beetlejuice and why it doesn’t work, it’s worth dwelling for a moment on the original Beetlejuice and why it does work.

The 1988 original takes a relatively simple premise—what if a newly dead couple assigned to haunt their dream home for the next 125 years didn’t care for the yuppies who moved in and started destroying all they built?—and hangs a whole bunch of visually neat and comically outrageous stuff around it. The Maitlands (Alec Baldwin and Geena Davis) and Lydia Deetz (Winona Ryder) are almost equally audience surrogates, navigating a strange afterlife where suicide victims staff social work offices while the titular bioexorcist (played with malevolently grotesque charm by Michael Keaton) introduces a little anarchy into all their, uh, lives.

The script’s relative simplicity allowed director Tim Burton to layer his visual oddities onto the screen—all the weird sculptures and bizarre monsters and playful auditory possessions—for an end product that was whimsically, comically horrifying. And that simplicity was hammered out by two writers over a series of drafts, as Alison Macor chronicled in Rewrite Man. (I talked to Alison about her book back in 2020 here.)

Warren Skaaren, who died in 1990, is an underappreciated figure in 1980s Hollywood. He did an uncredited rewrite on Top Gun that most people in town credited with making the movie an enormous hit and, after Beetlejuice, would work on Burton’s Batman. He took over Beetlejuice from Michael McDowell, who wrote the first draft; after meeting with Burton, Skaaren came away with a handful of notes, the first of which was “Select and invent a stronger, more simple story line.” Among the revisions: a reduction in the number of Deetz children from two to one and a focus on the girl’s “questions about death, which are really questions about life.” Executives helped nail the Lydia character down further (“Poetic melancholy or a punkish type? Make her consistent in look and language,” one told Skaaren). Skaaren and Burton would add some extra scenes with Keaton after test audiences went through the roof for his performance.

In other words, Beetlejuice is a high-water mark of the high-concept era of filmmaking. It’s a combination of the art school sensibilities of a weirdo auteur (I mean that as a compliment) and the skills of an accomplished script doctor who did most of his work from his home base in Austin, Texas, faxing new pages wherever they were needed, the final product massaged by the machinations of studio suits looking to please audiences in the largest number possible.

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It’s not just that Beetlejuice Beetlejuice has no real reason to exist; lots of sequels don’t need to exist, yet they turn out fine anyway. It’s more that Beetlejuice Beetlejuice has forgotten what made the original so successful. It’s as if screenwriters Alfred Gough and Miles Millar, who share a story credit with Seth Grahame-Smith, asked what if, instead of simplicity, we introduced a half-dozen characters whom the film never gets a chance to flesh out and stick them in nearly as many subplots that wither on the vine? Would that be just as good?

Allow me to suggest, dear reader, that the answer to that question is no. No it is not just as good. Beetlejuice Beetlejuice introduces too many new characters and too many additional subplots to allow us to get to know any of these characters or effectively resolve any of these subplots in its 104-minute runtime. The sequel has traded simplicity for complication and hopes to skate by on amusing character design and nostalgia rather than jokes with actual laugh lines.

Lydia Deetz (Ryder, returning) has grown and her daughter, Astrid (Jenna Ortega), is just as disaffected as her mother was at her age. But here we’re met with a characterization problem. Is she disaffected because she’s depressed about the state of the environment, as is suggested by her activist work? Or because her mother, who hosts a TV show about the paranormal, is treated like a joke by the kids in her school? Or because she can’t find a boyfriend? Or because her father disappeared in a sojourn down the Amazon and his potential replacement, Rory (Justin Theroux), sucks so much? Who can say. All of the above, I guess. She has too many problems for one movie to solve.

There are too many new relationships. There’s Rory and Lydia’s pairing, into which Beetlejuice intrudes. Jenna eventually falls for local boy Jeremy (Arthur Conti), who is hiding a secret. Beetlejuice is being hunted by a soul-sucking ex, Delores (Monica Bellucci), who is in turn being hunted by Wolf Jackson (Willem Dafoe), an afterlife cop who was an actor who died doing his own stunts. Meanwhile, all of the relationships from the original film are discarded. The absence of the Maitlands is explained in a single line by Lydia (“We found a loophole and they moved on,” she says, to which Astrid snarks “How convenient,” to which I almost yelled at the screen “Yes it really is, isn’t it?”).

The absence of Lydia’s father Charles, is more complicated, given the, ah, unpleasantness surrounding Jeffrey Jones, but this is handled first by showing him die via shark attack in a Claymation interlude before having his headless corpse wandering the afterlife. Honestly, the funniest gag in the movie is the increasingly ridiculous lengths Burton and his coworkers go to avoid having him appear onscreen in the flesh, but that’s only really funny for extratextual, vaguely horrifying reasons.

There’s just too much going on for anything to really land with audiences, and the jokes are too sloppily constructed to really inspire laughs. Nearly every gag is predicated on recalling something from the original film, as when Beetlejuice works in some sort of call center where all the employees have shrunken heads. Remember the closing moments of the first? With the guy who had the shrunken head? What if there were, like, a dozen of them? For some reason? Wouldn’t that be funny?

I mean, I guess, kinda, in the sense that shrunken heads are kinda funny visually? But as a joke it doesn’t work. It’s just brand maintenance and nostalgia.

Tim Burton (R) and Michael Keaton on the set of ‘Batman’ (1989) (MovieStillsDB)

As I mentioned, Skaaren, Burton, and Keaton would reteam after Beetlejuice on Batman, a movie that would break opening-weekend records upon release in 1989 and fundamentally alter the nature of studio filmmaking in ways we’re still wrestling with today. That film helped move the industry away from high-concept filmmaking and toward an emphasis on intellectual property and merchandising sales. Maximizing opening weekend grosses led to both big businesses and bold headlines. You can draw a straight line from Batman to Spider-Man to the Marvel Cinematic Universe and the dominance of franchise fare more broadly: branding, rather than ideas, was what mattered.

In truth, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is less a descendant of Beetlejuice than Batman. It doesn’t exist to continue the story of the Deetz family or chronicle the exploits of the Ghost with the Most. It exists to get people thirsty for nostalgia to pony up for a trip to the theater and to sell Denny’s breakfasts and to inspire Crumbl creations. I’m sure it’ll make a bunch of people a bunch of money in the short term; the box office projections are through the roof. But I have a hard time believing many will be watching it 35 years from now.