Thirty-six years after the original, the Deetz family are now back along with Beetlejuice and his tricks.
For the sequel, viewers are taken on a twisting journey through the Neitherworld, which culminates in a funny climax with poignant lessons.
The original film saw a recently deceased couple return to their former home as ghosts and contact Beetlejuice, a "bio-exorcist" from the Netherworld, to help scare away the new inhabitants – the Deetz family.
The film opened the Venice Film Festival on August 28 with a three-minute standing ovation.
Beetlejuice Beetlejuice was released today (Friday) at cinemas.
Here is everything else you need to know about the Beetlejuice sequel.
Why has the sequel taken so long?
The 1988 original was a critical and commercial success, which naturally led to a sequel being put into development in 1990.
Mad ideas, such as a script featuring Beetlejuice in Hawaii, were never moved forward as Burton directed numerous other films, leaving Michael Keaton to play Batman and Winona Ryder to achieve superstardom in her early 20s.
The Hawaii script was scrapped in the late 90s, with Ryder being too old by that point to play a teenager. And that was it for another 15 or so years until signs of life emerged in 2011, when Warner Bros. hired Seth Grahame-Smith to write a sequel on the condition that Keaton would return.
Grahame-Smith’s name is credited to the story for Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, so it seems his work has survived, but the project again went cold in the late 2010s.
In 2022, Warner Bros. confirmed it was back on, with Brad Pitt’s Plan B as the production studio. Tim Burton, Ryder, and Keaton were announced to be on board later that year.
Who is in the cast for Beetlejuice Beetlejuice?
Of course, Keaton returns as the eponymous Beetlejuice, the devious and sharp-witted main character who has become famous for his pin-striped suits.
Ryder played teenage goth Lydia Deetz in the original, with Catherine O’Hara’s Delia as her mother. The pair are central to the plot as humans bond with the ghosts despite Beetlejuice’s efforts to scare them off.
Meanwhile, Jenna Ortega – who played the titular Wednesday in the gothic Netflix series – joins the cast as Astrid, the teenage daughter of Lydia (doesn’t time fly…).
Other cast members include Monica Bellucci as Beetlejuice’s wife as well as Willem Dafoe as a ghost detective, and Justin Theroux as Rory – a part we don’t know too much about.
