This isn't going to be a full review of the movie Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, but more about how Hollywood is pushing out these nostalgia sequels to an annoying degree. I will talk about the new Beetlejuice movie and how I felt about it too, but also about the state of Hollywood and how it has been bringing back a lot of dead franchises to try to bring audiences back to the theatres.
In the past few years, we've seen a lot of sequels come out to movies that are decades old and were perfectly fine staying in the past. Movies like Twister, Beverly Hills Cop, Chicken Run, Indiana Jones, Top Gun, Coming To America, Gladiator, and The Exorcists have all gotten or are getting sequels pretty soon. Really the only one on that list that actually felt worth making was Top Gun Maverick. Well, Gladiator 2 is still coming, but I'm not super excited about that one as of now. Then of course there's Beetlejuice Beetlejuice which just came out recently...
I honestly thought the new Beetlejuice movie was okay. It certainly didn't live up to the first movie's greatness, but I think most people didn't expect it would. The cast did a good job going back to the characters they played over 30 years ago, especially Michael Keaton. That being said the story of the movie just didn't work for me as it was pretty all over the place and it felt like it didn't know which characters to focus on so it tried to give 4 characters equal time in the story to poor results. That and the fact that the two big villains both end up not really having much impact to the story. There was certainly an interesting story they could have told here, but it ended up being a little too all over the place and unfocused. That and Beetlejuice himself felt like he could have been handled better. He was still the best part of the movie though and the moments we see him onscreen are pretty fun overall. It just sucks that his part of the story felt so insignificant. The practical effects were great to see and the makeup and costumes were pretty spot-on. Even the villain played by Monica Bellucci was interesting in design, but her character was so pointless to the story it didn't really feel like her story even belonged in this movie. Overall I'd say it was a grade-C movie, it will be a fun movie to watch on a marathon along with the first one, but it fails to reach the highs of the original.
But all this brings me to the Hollywood sequel problem we've been seeing a lot recently. Not that Hollywood hasn't been making sequels and reboots before this time, but it just feels like lately they've been obsessed with making sequels after 20+ years and bringing back the original cast after they've aged out of their original characters. Like watching a 70-year-old Indiana Jones is a super great idea, no offense to Harrison Ford who is still a great actor today, but that role should be put to rest already for him. There are a few times where this has actually worked, as I mentioned before with Top Gun Maverick. Also, movies like Blade Runner 2049, Doctor Sleep, and T2 Trainspotting. Those movies actually had an interesting idea that used the real passage of time to tell good stories about where the characters ended up after the original movies and their new struggles. But that's not as common as just a movie that's trying desperately to recapture some magic from the past without actually doing anything interesting with its old characters. For them, name recognition alone is enough to just make them think people are going to watch the movie no matter what. The annoying thing is that it actually ends up working a lot of the time, as audiences see that the original cast is returning and will tune in to see their favorite characters return to the screen. But really most of the time it just takes the great endings they had in the original movies and ruins them by putting them in new stories that are disappointing or sometimes even ruin all the growth the characters had in the original movies. Another way you could potentially handle a sequel and make it interesting is by introducing a new cast of characters to possibly replace the original ones like in the recent Creed movies or the last two Mad Max movies. They take place in the same timeline as the originals but either recast the main characters or introduce new ones to take the place of the old ones. I think this method has had a bit more success, which also applies to Doctor Sleep and Blade Runner 2049.
Hollywood continues its overreliance on sequels and well-known franchises instead of trying to create new ones for audiences to fall in love with. Or just make original movies that don't have to get 10 sequels. I also don't want you to think that I hate anything that is part of a huge franchise because that's not true. There are plenty of great movies that ARE sequels the problem lies more in Hollywood trying to force more sequels when there aren't really any more stories to tell in a franchise. Things like Jurassic Park keep getting sequels even when they haven't actually had an interesting story to tell since the original. But it's all about the money anyway, and if that money the studios were making ended up being used to make more original franchises then maybe it would all even out, but really it just ends up going into another franchise movie that costs 100 million to make... you know like Gladiator 2... I promise I'll give it a chance, but jeez that budget is making it so this movie pretty much HAS to be successful. It might also be Ridley Scott's last chance to prove to studios he can still make a big-budget movie that doesn't lose a ton of money, cause he has had some stinkers lately.