Many of your favorite characters from the first film return in this sequel to Tim Burton’s 1988 masterpiece, including Lydia Deetz (Winona Ryder), her stepmother Delia Deetz (Catherine O’Hara), and of course the most self-aware ghost, Betelgeuse (Michael Keaton). Burton directed the original film.
Of course, there are some exceptions. Interestingly, Jeffrey Jones is absent because he dies in a stop-motion animation scene while playing Charles Deetz. (This is related to Jones’s real-life off-camera sex offender status just as much as it is to narrative drive.)
But Alec Baldwin and Geena Davis’s portrayals of Barbara and Adam Maitland in Beetlejuice are among the most conspicuous omissions.
More On Beetlejuice 2 and absence of characters
Astrid (Jenna Ortega), Lydia’s daughter, asks her mother Astrid what happened to the Maitlands when they go back to the Winter River house. Don’t they still need to be attached to the house? Lydia claimed they “moved on” after discovering a “loophole.”
Statement about her absenteeism outside of the film
Burton stated to People last month, “I think it was a case of not just checking any boxes.” I was therefore preoccupied with something else even though they were such a wonderful, essential component of the first one.
Geena Davis stated about Beetlejuice 2 to Entertainment Tonight earlier this year, “I’m not in the remake.” Oh, that’s what you anticipated? Yes, but what do you know? Since ghosts, in my belief, never age, Not that I carried that out!
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Keaton a ghost and he has aged
Yes, he did. But he’s got conventional, frightful makeup all over him. Perhaps they were concerned about Baldwin and Davis’s appearances in Beetlejuice 2without makeup. Or perhaps they were opposed to using sophisticated digital anti-aging technology?
Yes, that doesn’t make much sense from a narrative standpoint, but as screenwriters Miles Millar and Alfred Gough told us, Beetlejuice was really more about the three generations of Deetz women than it was about the wacky ghost antics.