It turns out you only need to say his name two times for the ghost with the most to appear. 36 years on, Michael Keaton’s bio-exorcist is returning to screens in Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, aka Beetlejuice 2, the long-awaited sequel to Tim Burton’s 1988 horror-comedy.
The follow-up to the cult favorite film has felt inevitable for the past decade, ever since both Keaton and Winona Ryder enjoyed hugely successful career renaissances. Add in the fact that Burton himself has found his groove again, thanks to the phenomenal popularity of Netflix’s Wednesday, and Beetlejuice Beetlejuice has a strong chance of recapturing the (dark) magic that made the original so enduringly entertaining. Having said that, it’s not like the entire gang that made the first movie is getting back together.
Alongside Keaton as BJ and Ryder as Lydia Deetz, Catherine O’Hara reprises her role as Lydia’s step-mother Delia, but other than that trio the announced cast is made up of new faces to the franchise — namely, Jenna Ortega as Lydia’s daughter, Astrid, with Justin Theroux, Willem Dafoe, and Monica Bellucci in unknown roles. Of course, the possibility remains for there to be some surprise cameos in the sequel too. But could original stars Alec Baldwin and Geena Davis don the bedsheets again to play the world’s nicest ghosts, the Maitlands?
Will Alec Baldwin (and Geena Davis) be back for Beetlejuice Beetlejuice?
Although Beetlejuice and Lydia are undoubtedly the icons of the first Beetlejuice, with the characters going on to be reimagined again and again in other mediums, such as the nostalgic cartoon series of the late ’80s and the popular off-Broadway musical, it’s actually Adam and Barbara Maitland who are the main characters of the movie. If you’ll recall, the Maitlands don’t move on to the afterlife by the end and have basically become a second set of loving parents to Lydia.
So why aren’t Alec Baldwin and Geena Davis confirmed to be part of the cast? Well, for starters, the two stars are in very different places in their careers from what they were in 1988. Davis is very selective about her film and TV projects these days; her last role in a major studio movie came in 2002’s Stuart Little 2. Meanwhile, Baldwin is still yet to fully emerge from the tragedy of the death of Halyna Hutchins on the set of Rust. At the time of writing, the actor is facing charges of manslaughter in New Mexico, to which he is pleading not guilty.
Honestly, though, there may be a much simpler storytelling reason why Baldwin and Davis were perhaps never even considered to return as the Maitlands in the first place. Davis herself pointed this out when asked about the chances of her coming back as Barbara in 2022. “I have a feeling that ghosts don’t age,” she opined to PEOPLE. And she’s got a point there…
As the Maitlands are unaging spirits, their appearances would have to be the same as they were in 1988, and while de-aging CGI could be employed to achieve this effect, Burton has been vocal about his desire to go back to a more lo-fi approach to filmmaking with this one, following many projects that have been reliant on special effects. “I tried to strip everything and go back to the basics of working with good people and actors and puppets,” he explained to The Independent. “It was kind of like going back to why I liked making movies.”
It may seem like there’s some kind of dark reason or cruel snub going on here with the lack of the Maitlands in Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, but their absence makes total sense. Sometimes it’s OK to let sleeping ghosts lie.
