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Just Beyond Creator Explains Why His Beetlejuice Sequel Never Happened

Fans of the 1988 classic fantasy comedy Beetlejuice have been itching to jump in line for a sequel more or less since the movie arrived in theaters over three decades ago, but for all the rumors, suggested storylines and the occasional whisper from some of the original stars that they would be happy to return for more hellish fun with the world’s only bio-exorcist, nothing has really managed to get started and the ghost with the most has remained sadly buried.

One of those who has come closest to bringing back Michael Keaton’s chaos loving ghost is Seth Grahame-Smith, the creator of the new R.L. Stine based Netflix series, Just Beyond, who has cited a follow-up to the Tim Burton movie as being a passion project of his. Speaking in an interview with Collider, the director was asked how his sequel never made it off the ground, especially when considering the fan base who really want to return to the world of Sandworms and the Handbook of the Recently Deceased.

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“It’s funny, when I had met with Tim about it last, and we’re talking about five years ago at this point, the reason that it’s so hard to get going is because so many people love it and because there are 10 million ways to get that sequel wrong and four ways to get it right. It’s such a very fine needle to thread that I certainly like didn’t get it there, on the script side. I didn’t thread the needle. There are things that were cool and some interesting ideas. I’ve certainly emotionally moved on from it and just said, ‘If it happens someday, it happens.'”

It should be said that if it was going to happen, this seems like the perfect time for it. There is currently a lot of love for “legacy” sequels such as 2018’s Halloween, Ghostbusters: Afterlife or the upcoming Scream, which essentially form a direct link between the original movie or movies and see returning cast members combining with new-to-franchise actors in a retro-modern combination that attempts to appeal to new and old fans alike. Michael Keaton is also currently on quite a run at the moment, having appeared in Marvel’s Spider-Man movies as the Vulture – a role that he is seemingly going to play in at least next year’s Morbius, and reprising his 1989 role of Batman for the upcoming DC movie The Flash, it would seem like a good time to try and pull him back into another of his much-loved roles.

Seth Grahame-Smith added, “Yeah. Michael Keaton is just as relevant as ever and, and Tim Burton is just as relevant as ever, but you have to have both of those people excited about something to do it. I couldn’t get it there personally, as a writer, but maybe somebody else can.”

There seemed to be a lot of talk about Beetlejuice 2 a couple of years ago, around the same time that Tim Burton was starting work on Miss Peregrine’s Home For Peculiar Children, and at the time Grahame-Smith was hopeful that something would happen once Burton completed that movie. With Michael Keaton expressing an interest and saying that Beetlejuice was “the only movie he was interested in doing a sequel to”, there is a question of whether something would have come of it if the Covid pandemic had not delayed so many existing projects in 2020. While fans live in hope that a sequel could still arrive at some point, it looks like it probably won’t be based on Grahame-Smith’s script.

Michael Keaton will be seen reprising his role as Bruce Wayne/Batman in The Flash, which is set to release on November 4th, 2022. This news comes to us from Collider.

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