This March, it will have been 26 years since Beetlejuice happened, if you want to take a moment and wonder where exactly your twenties went. Most people now know Alec Baldwin less for his chest hair in Working Girl and more for throwing a tantrum about Words With Friends. It’s possible that Michael Keaton wished everyone would forget he was ever the guy in that thing, as on a recent press junket for Robocop, all anyone seemed to want to discuss with him was Batman and Beetlejuice.
When asked about the possibility of a sequel for the latter, Keaton commented:
“I’ve e-mailed Tim a couple of times, talked to the writer a couple of times, but all really, really preliminary stuff,” Keaton said. “I always said that’s the one thing I’d like to do again, if I ever did anything again. But it kind of required Tim to be involved some way or another.”
Since 2/3rds of the original Beetlejuice writing team is dead, and chanting their names in the mirror isn’t going to help a sequel along, Seth Grahame-Smith has been working on a screenplay since at least 2012. Grahame-Smith is the guy who wrote the Dark Shadows movie, so that’s a good idea. Keep in mind that as recently as 1990, one of the Batman writers was hired to try and figure out a Beetlejuice sequel, which — and this is the part where I’m not joking — involved a Deets family vacation to Hawaii and Beetlejuice winning a surfing competition. (It should be noted that at the time, Burton did not want to make a Beetlejuice sequel, and this was his way of screwing with the studio, who missed the point entirely.) Also keep in mind that not even Kevin Smith wanted to ride the terrible-sequels gravy train, and turned down an offer to screenwrite. *carefully setting aside a joke about Kevin Smith leaving alone anything to do with gravy*
Keaton goes on to make it clear that he will not be interested in a Beetlejuice sequel unless Tim Burton is involved. Since we all know sending an email about wanting to work on something is absolutely an ironclad way to get things done, we can expect Beetlejuice 2 to hit the cinema about the same time as Ghostbusters 3. Which is approximately never.
Also, unclear: Who Johnny Depp will be portraying and what exactly he’ll be wearing on his head. How much eyeliner will he have? Does the eye makeup budget go all towards Keaton? I look forward to my fanfic illustrating future pretend throwdowns between the two on the Beetlejuice, Too! set.
Via MTV