Beetlejuice Beetlejuice (2024)
Directed by Tim Burton
Written by Alfred Gough, Miles Millar
Starring Jenna Ortega, Michael Keaton, Winona Ryder, Catherine O’Hara
Release Date September 6th, 2024
Published September 6th, 2024
A better title for Beetlejuice Beetlejuice would be Beetlejuice 2: Fulfilling Our Contractual Obligations. Or, even better, Beetlejuice 2: HERE! Now, Stop Asking Us to Make a Sequel to Beetlejuice. This sequel to 1988’s beloved horror comedy classic has the stink of a script that’s been sitting in a box in someone's attic for 30 years. Once contracts were signed, screenwriter's Miles Millar and Alfred Gough simply blew the dust off of it, tacked on a character to be played by "insert popular young actress here;” and gave it to Tim ‘where’s my check’ Burton to halfheartedly turn it into a movie.
My thesis statement on why Beetlejuice Beetlejuice feels like a movie made at gunpoint from a script barely revised in the past 30 years comes in the form of jokes referencing the Disco era TV show Soul Train and the use of the 1978 Donna Summer hit MacArthur Park in a key moment of the final act. These references might have played in a Beetlejuice sequel written and released in 1991 but in a sequel released in 2024, these relics of the 1970s are going to baffle modern audiences. It’s clear from these gags that no one in Beetlejuice Beetlejuice bothered to make the movie even remotely relevant to a modern audience. That simply would have been too much work.
Find my full length review at Geeks.Media, linked here.
