Netflix’s Wednesday Is The Reason Tim Burton is Making Beetlejuice 2

“I actually had sort of lost interest in the movie industry,” he told the outlet, recalling his state of mind right before the COVID-19 pandemic flipped Hollywood on its head. “It was at a strange juncture in time when everybody was concerned that streaming was going to take over. And I felt like I’d had enough with studios, I’d had enough of all this kind of stuff.” It was shooting “Wednesday” season 1 in Romania that left Burton rejuvenated and reinvigorated his interest in a “Beetlejuice” sequel. As he put it:

“I’d never done a TV thing before, and it felt like I was going back to basics, going back to just doing something. And being in Romania was this strange, interesting, kind of introspective time, you know, roaming the Carpathian Mountains and thinking and whatever. And I enjoyed the experience, trying to shoot [what felt] like a movie on a TV schedule, kind of quick it reenergized me a little bit, and it triggered things about ‘Beetlejuice’ for me. And I thought, ‘Well, none of us are getting any younger.”

His flame rekindled, Burton got “Wednesday” creators Alfred Gough and Miles Millar to write the “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice” script. “I gave them a pretty strong pitch — all the key points,” he explained. It surely helped that Burton had already made several prior failed attempts to get some version of “Beetlejuice 2” off the ground. “There was always talk throughout the years of, ‘What about a Beetlejuice sequel?'” he recalled. “Different ideas came up: Beetlejuice goes to Hawaii, Beetlejuice goes to … outer space, I don’t know, whatever we talked about!” So, by the time he approached Gough and Millar, he not only knew what the film should be, he also knew what it shouldn’t be.