Netflix's Wednesday Is The Reason Beetlejuice 2 Finally Got Made

The last film Tim Burton directed, 2019's live-action "Dumbo" remake, became something of an accidental metaphor for his career. For its first half, the movie sticks fairly close to Disney's original 1941 animated feature, as the titular elephant with unusually large ears is abused and treated with disdain by the customers at the traveling circus where he resides. When Dumbo's newfound ability to fly makes him the show's star attraction (the point at which the animated film ends), he and his fellow performers are recruited by a greedy and unscrupulous businessman (Michael Keaton) who exploits them at his gaudy amusement park. It's up to Dumbo and his pals to escape the park in search of greener pastures.

It's not a one-to-one analogy, but you can see why, upon reflection, Burton said Disney was a "horrible big circus" and he was its Dumbo. After decades of collaborating, the once visionary filmmaker had become little more than just another cog in the Mouse House's machine by the time he was refurbishing the studio's fanciful, colorfully animated feature "Alice in Wonderland" as an unsightly, sluggish live-action/CGI tentpole in 2010. In point of fact, his output from the last 20 years has felt increasingly staid and uninspired, as though Burton lost his spark along the way and had become one of the squares that he mocked as a younger director. (He didn't help his case with his previous comments defending the absence of non-white actors in his movies, either.)

Speaking with Empire Magazine, Burton admitted that his zeal for making movies had largely evaporated by the time he'd finished "Dumbo." It was only thanks to his efforts on the immensely popular Netflix series "Wednesday" that he decided to give it another go by tackling "Beetlejuice Beetlejuice," the long-awaited sequel to his supernatural horror-comedy classic.

"I actually had sort of lost interest in the movie industry," he told the outlet, recalling his state of mind right before the COVID-19 pandemic flipped Hollywood on its head. "It was at a strange juncture in time when everybody was concerned that streaming was going to take over. And I felt like I'd had enough with studios, I'd had enough of all this kind of stuff." It was shooting "Wednesday" season 1 in Romania that left Burton rejuvenated and reinvigorated his interest in a "Beetlejuice" sequel. As he put it:

"I'd never done a TV thing before, and it felt like I was going back to basics, going back to just doing something. And being in Romania was this strange, interesting, kind of introspective time, you know, roaming the Carpathian Mountains and thinking and whatever. And I enjoyed the experience, trying to shoot [what felt] like a movie on a TV schedule, kind of quick it reenergized me a little bit, and it triggered things about 'Beetlejuice' for me. And I thought, 'Well, none of us are getting any younger."

His flame rekindled, Burton got "Wednesday" creators Alfred Gough and Miles Millar to write the "Beetlejuice Beetlejuice" script. "I gave them a pretty strong pitch — all the key points," he explained. It surely helped that Burton had already made several prior failed attempts to get some version of "Beetlejuice 2" off the ground. "There was always talk throughout the years of, 'What about a Beetlejuice sequel?'" he recalled. "Different ideas came up: Beetlejuice goes to Hawaii, Beetlejuice goes to ... outer space, I don't know, whatever we talked about!" So, by the time he approached Gough and Millar, he not only knew what the film should be, he also knew what it shouldn't be.

If "Wednesday" season 1 was Burton reversing direction to pull himself out of a swamp he'd driven into, then the hope is that "Beetlejuice Beetlejuice" will serve as his proper comeback. The film reunites the director with both his "Wednesday" star Jenna Ortega and another one of his muses, Winona Ryder. Even so, it was really his desire to revisit the latter's "Beetlejuice" character — goth icon Lydia Deetz — as an middle-aged woman, now with a difficult daughter of her own (Ortega), that motivated Burton to return to the Beetle-realm at long last.

"From the first [film], I really identified with Lydia. It was a character that I understood, that I felt very strongly about," he explained, adding:

"The new film became very personal to me, through the Lydia character. What happened to Lydia? You know, what happens to people? What happens to all of us? What's your journey from a gothic kind of weird teenager to what happens to you 35 years later?"

Burton's best work has always had a strong autobiographical slant, so that's certainly a better excuse for making a "Beetlejuice" sequel than a studio-issued mandate. Keaton seems equally happy to be back playing "The Ghost With the Most," judging by what we've seen of "Beetlejuice Beetlejuice" so far, and the film's return to the hand-made, practical aesthetic of Burton's 1988 original is encouraging. Personally, I'm not expecting the movie to blow anyone out of the water, but I don't need it to, either. If all we get is one more decent Burton film, then that would be a win in my book.

"Beetlejuice Beetlejuice" begins haunting theaters on September 6, 2024.