Michael Keaton is having a major career renaissance. After a quiet period in the 2000s, he roared back onto screens with 2014’s Birdman, picking up an Academy Award nomination for Best Actor. Since then, he’s played Vulture in Spider-Man: Homecoming, is set to reprise the role of Batman in The Flash, and could be portraying the Dark Knight across multiple upcoming DC movies. But now it’s looking like there’s another big revival of his iconic past characters on the cards, as the wheels may finally be turning on a new Beetlejuice project.
The 1988 Tim Burton effort launched Keaton to stardom, made a lot of money and a sequel was quickly planned. This was to be called Beetlejuice Goes Hawaiian and would’ve taken the action tropical, concluding with the ghostly antihero winning a surfing contest. Perhaps it’s best that that didn’t get made, but now, more than three decades on from the original, leaker Daniel Richtman claims that Warner Bros. wants to do two new movies and Keaton is hoping to return for both.
There’ve been vague rumblings that this has been on the cards for some time, of course. Back in 2014, Burton said he missed working with Keaton and that a script was being developed. Then, in 2015, there was talk that filming would begin before the end of that year, with Keaton and Winona Ryder both reprising their roles. Sadly, however, this never happened and, after several rewrites, Warner Bros. shelved the project in early 2019.
But you can’t keep the dead down for long and if the plan really is for two more films, my bet is that they’d shoot them back to back and release them over consecutive years, potentially hinting at a more epic storyline than the domestic haunting of the original. In any case, let’s hope we get some confirmation on these Beetlejuice sequels soon. As far as I’m concerned, the more Keaton movies the better.
