Tim Burton explains why he didn't ask Geena Davis and Alec Baldwin back for Beetlejuice Beetlejuice
"I think the thing was for me I didn't want to just tick any boxes," Burton said, explaining the absence of the previous film's stars
Photo: Ernesto Ruscio/Getty Images
Now that we can all breathe a collective sigh of relief at the fact that Tim Burton’s long-delayed Beetlejuice sequel, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, does not seem to suck—at least, according to reviews, including our own, out of its premiere at the Venice Film Festival—we can dial even further into the making of the afterlife comedy. Specifically, the question of why Burton decided not to include the characters played by Alec Baldwin and Geena Davis in the movie, even though the original film shows the late Adam and Barbara Maitland ensconced as part of Deetz family life, complete with elaborate musical numbers.
Burton laid the answer out for People, noting that “I think the thing was for me I didn’t want to just tick any boxes” when writing the second film. “So even though they were such an amazing integral part of the first one, I was focusing on something else.” (According to reviews, the Maitlands’ absence is explained by a line in the new movie about them finding a “loophole” out of their haunting situation.) Burton went on to say that part of the reason he even managed to finish writing the new movie—despite having had plans for years to do a possible Beetlejuice sequel—is because he focused in on the idea of three generations of Deetz women: Lydia and Delia, played by the returning Winona Ryder and Catherine O’Hara, and newcomer Astrid, played by Wednesday star Jenna Ortega. “A sequel like this, it really had to do with the time,” Burton said. “That was my hook into it, the three generations of mother, daughter, granddaughter. And that [would] be the nucleus of it. I couldn’t have made this personally back in 1989 or whatever.”
Although Alec Baldwin hasn’t commented on his lack of appearance in the new movie—having been busy this summer with, uh, other stuff—Geena Davis did weigh in a few months back, joking that she assumed she didn’t get the call because “ghosts don’t age.”
(Meanwhile, Burton did not address the decision to have Jeffrey Jones’ character, Charles Deetz, die off between the two movies, with no ghost in sight, presumably because we’re all trying to have a nice, chill press cycle here without contemplating anything too depressing.)