After decades of development, Beetlejuice is finally getting a legacyquel — and, improbably, it’s from its original director and stars, Tim Burton, Michael Keaton, and Winona Ryder. When the original movie was released in 1988, it became the unlikeliest of hits: A pitch-black comedy about ghosts, death, monsters, and a foul-mouthed bio-exorcist (that’d be Beetlejuice, played by Keaton) that was pitched to families and even kids. (Trust me: You’ll never guess what Beetlejuice was rated.)
Maybe the unlikeliness of that success is why Beetlejuice 2 took more than three decades to get off the ground; it’s awfully hard to catch lightning in a bottle once; twice is basically impossible. And looking back at Beetlejuice all those years later, the movie (which was written by Michael McDowell, Larry Wilson, and Warren Skaaren) does hold up as a really funny and truly twisted dark comedy.
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But that’s the thing — it is so dark and so twisted, it is hard to imagine it being made today. Certainly, if Tim Burton tried to make Beetlejuice 1 right now, he would face enormous opposition, if not outright rejection. And even making a sequel to this beloved ’80s classic, it seems all but guaranteed that the new Beetlejuice will have to severely tamp down certain aspects of the first movie (and remove others altogether) in order to appeal to modern audiences and their sensibilities. Here are seven examples from Beetlejuice that definitely won’t appear in Beetlejuice 2…
Jokes In the Original Beetlejuice That Won’t Fly in the Sequel
These gags made Beetlejuice into a comedy classic. But times have changed since the original movie came out…
Beetlejuice 2 is scheduled to open in theaters on September 6, 2024.
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