Catherine O’Hara To People Who Don’t Like Beetlejuice Sequel: “F*** Them”

The annual CinemaCon is not only a chance for theater owners to get together and exchange popcorn-buttering tips. It’s also a venue for creatives and cast members to beat the drum for upcoming films like the Beetlejuice Beetlejuice sequel. Tim Burton, Michael Keaton, Catherine O'Hara, Justin Theroux, Monica Bellucci, and Willem Dafoe all turned out in Vegas this week to get the multiplex mavens pumped about the fall release, according to an Entertainment Weekly report. In a featurette about the film, O'Hara promised that the sequel would deliver the same laughs and scares as the original Beetlejuice. "And if people don't like it,” she said, “then f*** them." 

Burton described the experience of making the comedy as “like a weird big home movie for me." Here’s the set-up: The original film’s Delia (O’Hara) and Lydia (Winona Ryder) move back to their old haunted house with Lydia's daughter Astrid (Jenna Ortega) after an unexpected death in the family. Astrid pokes around the attic and finds the model town, accidentally opening another portal to the Afterlife. You can guess which ghost has been waiting to return to Lydia’s reality. "It's truly very personal and emotional and special," Burton says. 

Ortega, who is the main new addition to the cast, has played in Burton’s personal Hot Topic before, starring in the Netflix smash Wednesday. The young star didn’t show up to hype Beetlejuice Beetlejuice but Burton sang her praises nonetheless. “She just got it,” he said. “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."

Burton introduced some new footage that has yet to leak out to the Internet, including grown-up Lydia counseling her daughter about communicating with the dead: “This ability didn't exactly come with instructions, it happened when I was about your age." 

Additional footage shows Ortega’s Astrid running from sandworms in a desert. Either she somehow got transported to Dune 2 or, as Entertainment Weekly speculates, “she gets trapped in the Afterlife and the other Deetz women have to get her out.”

Keaton sounds pretty pumped about the whole thing, admitting he’s watched Beetlejuice Beetlejuice two times already.  "Everyone is so friggin' funny,” he gushed. “It's unbelievable how funny these guys are. I was very nervous to see if we could pull it off again but every day got more and more fun.”

Then Keaton doubled down on O’Hara’s expletive-laden endorsement. “It’s really f***ing good.”