Early last year, there were rumors that Tim Burton was trying to pitch Beetlejuice 2 to studios, possibly because he figures it’ll just get remade anyway if he doesn’t do something. And it turns out there might be a little more to that than we thought.
Burton, it turns out, has been juggling production schedules to figure out how to make it work, at least according to rumor. And it would kind of make sense as even a modest Beetlejuice would probably eat up a lot of time.
And we do know that this is more than an idle fancy; the movie’s screenwriter, Seth Graeme-Smith of Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter fame, teased fans on Twitter about it a few months ago, although we’re not ruling out that he was just working on the VMAs. And we’re not really joking about the remake thing; Burton’s known to be possessive over his movies and considering the remake streak most studios are on, it wouldn’t be surprising if Burton was trying to head something worse off at the pass with Beetlejuice 2. Knowing studios, they were probably planning to remake it as a horror movie because Clive Barker wouldn’t let them remake Candyman.
The flipside of that, though, is… well, where do you go from the original? Leaving aside that everyone involved is twenty-five years older and has a few convictions under their belt in some cases, the first movie really did do a good job of being its own, standalone story with few sequel hooks or other blatant attempts to make it a franchise. It’s hard to see what the intervening years would bring to the story.
That said, if something is going to happen, better Burton is running it than some guy who directed a couple of Mercedes ads and has blackmail photos of a producer. At least Burton might stick to using practical effects.