Tim Burton’s much-anticipated sequel to his 1988 cult classic, Beetlejuice, has been generating buzz since it was first announced, and with its premiere at the 2024 Venice Film Festival, fans have been eager to see which beloved characters would return. Michael Keaton is back as the mischievous demon Beetlejuice, alongside Winona Ryder’s Lydia Deetz and Catherine O’Hara’s Delia. However, two key figures from the original film, Alec Baldwin and Geena Davis, who portrayed the ghostly couple Adam and Barbara Maitland, are notably absent.
In a recent interview with People, Burton shared his reasoning for excluding Baldwin and Davis from the sequel. “I think the thing was for me I didn’t want to just tick any boxes,” Burton explained. “So even though they were such an amazing, integral part of the first one, I was focusing on something else.”
In the original Beetlejuice, Baldwin and Davis’s characters were central to the plot, as the recently deceased couple trying to haunt their old home, only to find themselves enlisting Beetlejuice’s help to scare away the new residents, the Deetz family. Their absence in the sequel is explained through a line of dialogue from Lydia’s daughter, Astrid (played by Jenna Ortega), who asks her mother about the ghosts she once knew. Lydia simply responds that “they found a loophole and moved on to the next plane,” as reported by Vanity Fair’s Richard Lawson.
Burton elaborated on the direction he took with the sequel, emphasizing the importance of the generational dynamic between Lydia, her daughter Astrid, and her stepmother Delia. “A sequel like this, it really had to do with the time,” Burton continued. “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.”
Geena Davis had previously speculated on her character’s absence, humorously suggesting that “ghosts don’t age,” which aligns with Burton’s focus on the passage of time and the evolution of the characters who remain.
Despite the absence of the Maitlands, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice promises to deliver the same quirky and darkly comedic tone that made the original a beloved classic, with a new focus on the next generation of the Deetz family.
Fans of the original will have to wait just a little longer to see how the story unfolds when Beetlejuice Beetlejuice hits theaters on September 6.