Warner Bros. is apparently primed to issue a third Beetlejuice—even though we’re fairly certain there are now two movies out there about how doing exactly that is a catastrophically bad idea.
This is per a recent conversation between Deadline and Warner Bros. Pictures co-CEOs Mike De Luca and Pam Abdy, in which the duo laid out a fairly aggressive defense of their recent film slate, something that got a lot easier to do after Minecraft stormed into theaters last week and made them and their bosses a whole bunch of money. You will probably not be surprised to hear that a sequel to Jared Hess’ video game adaptation has been immediately fast-tracked, but we were genuinely shocked that the pair is feeling similarly rosy on the concept of a Beetlejuice 3.
Look: We kind of liked Tim Burton’s long-delayed sequel to his horror-comedy classic; it’s often genuinely weird, and where it’s self-indulgent (which it is, all over the place), it’s at least self-indulgent in a way that puts neat things on the screen with some frequency. But making $450 million on a $100 million budget, while fine, definitely didn’t communicate to us that this was the next big franchise that Warner Bros. was going to bet big on with “imminent” plans to develop a sequel, so we’re honestly a little surprised.
That’s to say nothing of practicalities: Michael Keaton has made it clear that he’d basically live as Betelgeuse—don’t yell at us, that’s how you’re supposed to spell the name of the character, not the movie—if he could, telling reporters last year that “I’d do it every year, yeah.” But Burton’s been a lot more reticent, joking that, at his current pace of one movie every three decades, he’d be more than 100 by the time the hypothetical Beetlejuice Beetlejuice Beetlejuice—ugh, we don’t even like typing it out—came out. But don’t tell that to De Luca and Abdy, who would like you to remember that Beetlejuice Beetlejuice was a hit film, so obviously they’re going to make another one.
