Winona Ryder and Tim Burton met secretly to make Beetlejuice 2 happen

It is no secret that Beetlejuice 2 is a long time coming and took a lot of man (or rather woman) power to get going, as in addition to star Michael Keaton and director Tim Burton hatching a plan for the follow-up, star Winona Ryder has revealed she had also been trying to get the movie off of the ground by having secret meetings with Burton. 

“There were a lot of times my agents didn’t know that I was meeting up with him,” Ryder said in an interview with Harper’s Bazaar, revealing she had been secretly working with Burton for years in order to get the sequel greenlit. Burton himself had been storming through numerous concept ideas for the sequel including “Beetlejuice Goes to Outer Space,” as he confirmed later in the interview. 

Well, all of those secret rendezvous paid off as now over 40 years after the original horror-comedy classic was released, Ryder and Keaton are back reprising their roles as Lydia Deetz and Beetlejuice for the sequel. However, the decision to greenlight the upcoming flick didn’t come lightly as after Keaton gave the movie his own stamp of approval, the man behind the ghoul admitted to People that he at first had reservations. “We thought, ‘You got to get this right’ otherwise, just don’t do it,” Keaton said. “So I was hesitant and cautious.” But after the cameras started rolling, Keaton’s fears rolled away. 

Beetlejuice 2, officially titled Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, revisits the Deetz’ as The Ghost with the Most is at risk of being summoned to the family once again, this time not by Lydia, but by her daughter Astrid Deetz played by Wednesday’s Jenna Ortega. The official synopsis reads: “With trouble brewing in both realms, it’s only a matter of time until someone says Beetlejuice’s name three times and the mischievous demon returns to unleash his very own brand of mayhem.”

As well as Ryder and Keaton, the sequel also welcomes back Catherine O’Hara as Delia Deetz and adds Poor Things’ Willem Dafoe, Mulholland Drive’s Justin Theroux, and The Matrix’s Monica Bellucci as Beetlejuice’s wife to its cast list. 

Beetlejuice 2 hits theaters on September 6, 2024. For more, check out all upcoming horror movies on the way, or keep up to date with our list of 2024 movie release dates.