'Beetlejuice' star Catherine O'Hara says if people don't like sequel 'f--- them' (2024)

Say his name three times and Michael Keaton does indeed appear.

Several of the stars of Beetlejuice Beetlejuice broke free from the Afterlife on Tuesday to make an appearance at CinemaCon in Las Vegas, bringing with them fresh footage from the sequel to 1988's cult classic and the promise that "it's really f---ing good."

"It's truly very personal and emotional and special," director Tim Burton said, joined by onstage by Keaton, Catherine O'Hara, Justin Theroux, Monica Bellucci, and Willem Dafoe. "It's like a weird big home movie for me."

In a featurette shown in the room, O'Hara said the sequel will have both scary and funny moments just like the original. "And if people don't like it, then f--- them," the actress added.

In the first film, the Deetz family — Jeffrey Jones' Charles, O'Hara's Delia, and Winona Ryder's Lydia — move from New York to a house in Winter River, Conn., after the previous owners, the Maitlands (Alec Baldwin, Geena Davis), died in a car accident. In an effort to expel the newcomers from the property, the ghosts of the Maitlands hire Keaton's Beetlejuice, a self-proclaimed "bio-exorcist," which ends up causing more problems than it solves.

Beetlejuice Beetlejuice (in theaters Sept. 6) now sees Delia and Lydia move back to the house with Lydia's daughter Astrid (Jenna Ortega) after an unexpected death in the family. When Astrid discovers the model of the town in the attic and the portal to the Afterlife is accidentally opened, Beetlejuice comes back into the mix.

Burton called the sequel's focus on three generations of Deetz women "the anchor to the film." Of the addition of Ortega, Keaton said, "She just got it. She just said, 'Oh I got it. I know what the tone is.' It would be very easy for someone to get very excited about this and maybe do more, but she just got it."

New footage shown in the room at CinemaCon showed a shot of the original house covered in black sheets. "This ability didn't exactly come with instructions, it happened when I was about your age," an adult Lydia says to her daughter, who picks up one of Beetlejuice's bio-exorcist flyers.

Lydia is shown once again summoning Beetlejuice, who keeps a photo of her on his desk in the Afterlife. "The evil and the dead, can they coexist? That's what we're here to find out," Lydia says in the footage.

Ortega's Astrid is shown running from sandworms in a desert, giving the impression that she gets trapped in the Afterlife and the other Deetz women have to get her out.

"I'll tell you this," Keaton said onstage of the sequel, invoking Beetlejuice's voice. "It's really f---ing good."

"This cast is so good," he added, sharing that he'd watched the sequel twice so far. "Everyone is so friggin' funny. It's unbelievable how funny these guys are."

"I was very nervous to see if we could pull it off again," he admitted, "but every day got more and more fun."

New cast members include Theroux (The Leftovers) as a man named Rory (seen opposite the Deetz women at Charles' funeral), Dafoe (Poor Things) as a former action movie star named WolfJackson now serving as a policeman in the Afterlife, Bellucci (Spectre) as an undead entity whom she described as "soul sucking," and Arthur Conti (House of the Dragon) in an undisclosed role.

"I so identified with the Lydia character, but then you get to all these years later, and you take your own journey, going from cool teenager to lame adult, back and forth again," director Tim Burton previously told Entertainment Weekly in an exclusive interview. "That made it emotional, gave it a foundation. So that was the thing that really truly got me into it."

As for getting Keaton back in his famous role, "He just got back into it," the filmmaker said. "It was kind of scary for somebody who was maybe not that overly interested in doing it. It was such a beautiful thing for me to see all the cast, but he, sort of like demon possession, just went right back into it."

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