Set photos have revealed our first look at Winona Ryder in Beetlejuice 2. The previous film, which came out 36 years ago, was about a couple, the Maitlands (Alec Baldwin, Geena Davis), who die and have another family, the Deetzs, move into their home. To get the unwanted buyers out, the Maitlands consider enlisting the help of Betelgeuse (pronounced like you pronounce the title of the movie), a "bio-exorcist."Ryder played Lydia Deetz, the goth daughter of the new homeowners. She is initially the only one who can see the deceased Maitlands, without using bedsheets, due to being "strange and unusual." In the set photos, courtesy of Epic Film Guys, we see Ryder looking very unchanged from how she looked in the 1988 movie, which will no doubt please the members of any fanbase who don't like anything to be different.Ryder's breakout role, Lydia, is the one everybody remembers besides Michael Keaton as Betelgeuse. So much so that the Maitlands (you know, the protagonists) lose some of their focus in the musical adaptation in favor of Lydia and outright don't appear in the animated series. There's also been no word if Baldwin and Davis are returning, alongside Ryder, Keaton, and Catherine O'Hara as Delia Deetz, Lydia's stepmother.
A Long Time Coming Sequel
The 36-year gap between installments wasn't due to a lack of trying. In the early '90s, there was an idea for a sequel called Beetlejuice Goes Hawaiian, which Jonathan Gems wrote. The film's premise would have been the Deetzs moving to Hawaii to build a vacation resort, only to find the intended location on top of an ancient burial ground. Betelgeuse would have also returned and accidentally awakened the native spirits.
According to Screen Rant, Warner Bros. was more interested in a sequel to Batman (1989), so Keaton and director Tim Burton made that movie instead. Fun fact, one of the writers of Batman Returns was Daniel Waters, who also wrote the script for Heathers (that explains a lot, doesn't it?), a movie that also starred Ryder.
After that, the Beetlejuice sequel seemed to be dead, with Gems saying, "You really couldn't do it now anyway. Winona is too old for the role, and the only way they could make it would be to totally recast it." Until 2011, when Seth Grahame-Smith, who adapted his novel Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter to film and wrote the Burton-directed Dark Shadows film adaption, was announced to be working on a script for a new movie.
Then, according to Screen Rant, in 2015, Grahame-Smith told Entertainment Weekly that he had finished the script and that filming should start by the end of the year, with Keaton and Ryder returning. So, what happened? In 2000, Grahame-Smith conducted another interview with Collider, in which he said he couldn't get the script quite right.