By As you may have heard, Tim Burton is making a sequel to Beetlejuice. Seth Grahame-Smith, the screenwriter behind Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter is working on a draft at the moment. Michael Keaton will be returning. Some of us are cautiously optimistic, and the majority of us are terrified at the impending ruin of our childhoods. It seems like those involved in the original might be with the majority of us.
At the Frankenweenie press junket in Anaheim on Sunday, a reporter enthusiastically told Winona Ryder that she was very excited for Beetlejuice 2 and hoped that Ryder would be in the movie. Ryder had just spent the fifteen minutes prior gushing about her emotional connection to all of her roles in Burton’s movies, with a particular emphasis on Lydia. Given that, you’d think she might be pretty enthusiastic about the new movie, or at least somewhat optimistic. Instead, her response was a heavy sigh, a roll of the eyes, and a “Yeah, that would be…great.”
Tim Burton himself seemed more optimistic about the project, but was surprisingly hands-off about the whole thing. When asked about the project, he sounded somewhat uncomfortable and gave a non-answer. “Somebody’s writing a version, but I’m sort of…not making any preconceived ideas about it, and…not over-thinking something that I haven’t seen, so I’m just kind of keeping an open mind about it and seeing what comes.” Burton said that he is passionate about every project he goes into, so he could just have his mind on other work, but it seems odd for him to be quite as distant as he is.