Geena Davis Has A Hilarious Lore Explanation for Why She Can’t Be in the New ‘Beetlejuice’ Movie

Given what she knows about the afterlife, Geena Davis isn’t upset that the current caretakers of the Beetlejuice franchise have cut both her and her on-screen husband Alec Baldwin out of the sequel — though, I think the technical term is “exorcized.”

After Dune 2 demonstrated the power that the combination of sandworms and sequels has to dominate online movie discourse, the next flick set to inspire a new generation of memes is Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, Tim Burton’s return to the 1988 supernatural comedy that helped launch his film career. Those who haven’t heard the news that Wednesday star Jenna Ortega will lead the new generation of haunters and hauntees probably assumed as much as soon as they learned about the sequel’s existence, and, with Winona Ryder and Michael Keaton returning to their original roles over three and a half decades later, the film seems to be one of those soft reboots that merges the old guard with the newcomers whom Burton hopes will take over the series.

However, absent from the list of deceased, damned and otherwise incorporeal repeat-performers are Davis and Baldwin, the two leads from the first film whose enlistment of the title character for extrasensory eviction work leads to the near-destruction of a quaint little Connecticut town. At this past Thursday’s CinemaCon 2024 Big Screen Achievement Awards, where Davis accepted the the Viola Davis Trailblazer Award, Davis explained her in-universe hypothesis for why she wasn’t invited to reprise the role of Barbara Maitland, telling Entertainment Tonight, “My theory is that ghosts don’t age... Not that I have.”

“No, I’m not. I’m not in the remake,” Davis told her interviewer when asked about her potential participation in Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, seemingly addressing all the disappointed fans of the original film. “Oh, you were expecting that I would be? Yeah, no.”

Davis theorized of the fate of the off-screen fates of the Maitlands, “Our characters are stuck the way they looked when they died, forever.” Though Davis wears all 68 of her living years well, she believes that undeath wouldn’t fit her 36 years later. “It’s been a while, it’s been a minute,” she reflected.

Despite her part in making Beetlejuice such a massive hit back at the end of the 1980s, Davis claims that she’s been completely out of the loop for news on the new installment — she hasn’t even watched the teasers. “I don’t know much, but I heard that the trailer came out, and somebody said they were crying,” she reported. “I have to see that trailer.”

Maybe that “somebody” was Winona Ryder — she’s losing her supernatural surrogate mother all over again.