This article contains mild spoilers for “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice.”
Tim Burton’s 1988 film “Beetlejuice” followed the post-death adventures of Adam and Barbara Maitland (Alec Baldwin and Geena Davis) after they died in a driving accident. By the movie’s lore, the afterlife is a soul-deadening bureaucracy and ghosts have to wait in years-long, DMV-like lines just to talk to their personal social workers. The Maitlands are unexpectedly assigned a haunting job that, according to some oblique contract, will require them to stay inside their country home for the next 125 years. This only becomes an issue when the house is sold and a family of caustic, stressed-out yuppies move in.
Luckily, the Maitlands bond with the yuppies’ teenage daughter Lydia (Winona Ryder), as she is a gloomy Goth able to see ghosts. By the end of the film, the Maitlands and the yuppies, the Deetzes, learn to live in the same house.
In the decades-later sequel “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice,” the Maitlands are nowhere to be seen. According to dialogue, there was a loophole in their haunting contract and they were allowed to “move on.” Lydia and her stepmother Delia (Catherine O’Hara) are the only ones who remember the Maitlands. Excluding Adam and Barbara was actually a gentle way to end their story. The Maitlands were unassuming crafts enthusiasts who had no taste for haunting, and allowing them to “move on” swiftly was a tender mercy.
The exclusion of the Maitlands in “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice” was also a practical consideration. It’s been 36 years since the first “Juice,” and Baldwin and Davis, while both still dazzling in their mid-60s, don’t look the same as they did in 1988. Speaking to Entertainment Weekly, “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice” co-screenwriter Alfred Gough revealed there was originally a scene near the end of the film where the Maitlands briefly returned to talk with the now-middle-aged Lydia, but it was cut when the filmmakers realized they couldn’t make Baldwin and Davis look convincingly younger.
The Maitlands were cut from Beetlejuice Beetlejuice
Several notable characters from the first “Beetlejuice,” it should be noted, return for the sequel. In addition to Lydia and Delia, the titular demon (Michael Keaton) plays a central role as well. However, Jeffrey Jones (who played Lydia’s father Charles in the original movie) was excluded for reasons you can look up yourself. Also returning is a character named Bob (Nick Kellington), a dead 14th-century hunter with a shrunken head.
Gough revealed that he and his fellow screenwriter, Miles Millar, had at least one draft of their “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice” script where the Maitlands, very briefly, appeared to Lydia, but that it was more tactful to leave them out. As he explained to EW:
“There was a version where they just showed up at the end, but the problem is they’re ghosts. So they kind of needed to look like they were 35, which was never going to happen. […] I think [director] Tim [Burton] felt, and Miles and I agreed, that their story had been told. So how do we move on from that?”
As such, the sequel is more about Lydia’s personal relationships, notably with her grumpy daughter Astrid (Jenna Ortega) and her obnoxious boyfriend Rory (Justin Theroux). When Lydia talks about the Maitlands, she is wistful and sensitive. Given how blissfully unassuming they were in the first movie, it might have even been inappropriate to involve them in the chaos of the second. Yes, the afterlife is wild, colorful, and strange in the “Beetlejuice” universe, but the Maitlands have earned their rest.
“Beetlejuice Beetlejuice” is now playing in theaters.