Beetlejuice Beetlejuice (Movie)

Subterms

    Latest story

    88 Shares28 Views

    ‘Beetlejuice Beetlejuice’ Hands Warner Bros. a Lifeline

    by

    The movie has made roughly $190 million in its first 10 days, giving the studio a needed hit after a summer of misfires.Warner Bros. managed only a 4.7 percent share of domestic movie-ticket sales over the summer. By that measure, it was Warner’s worst performance since analysts started to compile seasonal box office data in 1982.A haze of despair had settled over the studio by mid-August. Warner Bros. Discovery, the studio’s parent company, had announced yet another round of layoffs. Then it botched the renewal of a crucial television rights deal with the National Basketball Association, prompting investors to flee. Shares were trading in the $6 range, down 90 percent from March 2021.So the horror comedy “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice,” which arrived in theaters from Warner on Sept. 6, in some ways became a flash referendum on the studio’s future. Some people in Hollywood were starting to wonder aloud if there would even be one, at least without a merger with a competitor.Talk about the undead: “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice” collected $111 million in its first weekend in North America, one of the best results on record for September. The PG-13 sequel, directed by Tim Burton, has now been No. 1 for two weeks in a row. It took in another $52 million over the weekend, for a 10-day domestic total of roughly $190 million.Worldwide ticket sales will total about $250 million through Sunday, according to box office analysts. The film cost $99 million to make.“Dancing in the hallways, smiles on faces,” said Michael De Luca, one of Warner’s top film executives. “There is really nothing better for morale than a hit.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    More stories

    • 125 Shares81 Views

      in Movies

      How ‘MacArthur Park’ Became the New ‘Day-O’ in ‘Beetlejuice Beetlejuice

      by

      Meet the new “Day-O”: Richard Harris’s 1968 psychedelic pop hit “MacArthur Park,” which Donna Summer remade as a disco anthem.Some spoilers follow.It’s the climactic moment in “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice.”Our title trickster has Lydia right where he wants her, in a red gown standing beside him before a priest at the altar. She has agreed to marry him in order to save the life of her daughter. A towering cake is rolled out, topped with slimy green icing and Lydia and Beetlejuice figures.And then … the cake starts to run.“MacArthur’s Park is melting in the dark / All the sweet, green icing flowing down,” a male voice intones (“sings” would be too generous) as the possessed wedding party — including Lydia’s stepmother, Delia (Catherine O’Hara) — flap around the cake, taking turns lip-syncing verses.The nonsensical sequence, which the film’s director, Tim Burton, has said was largely improvised, sets the tone for a wedding from hell. The song seems as odd a choice as the use of Harry Belafonte’s version of the Jamaican folk tune “Day-O” to score the dinner-table possession scene in Burton’s original 1988 film.What is that song? Why did Burton tap it as the new “Day-O”? What do the lyrics mean? Here’s a guide.What is that song?It’s “MacArthur Park,” a folk-pop ballad the singer-songwriter Jimmy Webb wrote in 1967. It was inspired by scenes he had observed while occasionally meeting his high school sweetheart, Susie Horton, for lunch in the real-life MacArthur Park in Los Angeles.Who ‘sings’ it?If you are a Harry Potter fan who said it almost sounds like … no, it can’t be … well, it is.New flash: Richard Harris, who played the Hogwarts headmaster Albus Dumbledore in the first two Harry Potter films, was also a musical artist.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 125 Shares72 Views

      in Movies

      From Winona Ryder to Jenna Ortega, a Goth Girl Timeline

      by

      From “Beetlejuice” to its sequel, these are the actresses and roles that made us embrace the darkness.Is it just fashion? No, it’s an attitude, a lifestyle. And a beloved character type. The goth girl is the lovable-yet-scary outcast whose grim and ghastly exterior belies wit, smarts and a dry sense of humor that never fails to cast an honest light on the disappointing world around her. As “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice” brings together two generations of legendary goth girls — Winona Ryder and Jenna Ortega — we look at some of the actresses and roles that have defined the archetype since the original “Beetlejuice” in 1988.1988Winona Ryder Sets the Standard“My whole life is a dark room. One big dark room.”Winona Ryder in “Beetlejuice.”Warner Bros.When Lydia Deetz appears in her family’s new Connecticut home early in “Beetlejuice,” she glances around curiously, her eyes wandering beneath her short, spiky black bangs, stopping at the sight of a spider in a web along the stairwell. Unlike her shallow, distracted parents, Lydia is clued in to the supernatural happenings of her new surroundings and has no trouble befriending the undead residents of the house.The role was one of Winona Ryder’s earliest in a career largely defined by goth girls and dark-attired outsiders. In the black comedy “Heathers,” Ryder played Veronica Sawyer, the reluctant friend to the popular girls, who prance around in bright matching outfits. Veronica, however, dresses in blacks and grays and gets drawn into a string of homicides that leaves multiple teenagers dead.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 75 Shares139 Views

      in Movies

      ‘Beetlejuice Beetlejuice’ Review: Delightfully Undead Again

      by

      Tim Burton has brought the band back together — Michael Keaton, Winona Ryder, even Bob the shrunken head guy — for a fun but less edgy sequel.After more than three decades and assorted ups, downs and spinoffs like an animated series and Broadway musical, most of the key players in the original “Beetlejuice” band — Tim Burton, Michael Keaton, Winona Ryder, Catherine O’Hara, Bob the shrunken-head guy — are back together. A lot has predictably changed along the way, yet one of the enjoyable aspects about reunion tours is that when a group has charmed its way into your consciousness, like this one did back in the day, a.k.a. 1988, you don’t mind (too much) its sporadically sour notes and slack timing.And, so, enter the dependably delightful Ryder as Lydia Deetz, the onetime Goth Girl whose family got into so much trouble the last time. Dressed in her customary black, from bangs to booted toe, her face as ethereally pale as ever, Lydia is the host of a paranormally inclined TV show, “Ghost House With Lydia Deetz,” and now a minor celebrity. She puts on a good front on camera, but Lydia remains a haunted soul, and now there’s more than memories of Beetlejuice (Keaton) that plague her: She’s a widow, and her daughter, Astrid (Jenna Ortega), is an eyeball-rolling, heavy-sighing mini-me of gloom, one who’s just itching to have her world rocked.Burton seems anxious to do just that, and he gets this party started without ceremony, cranking it into nicely morbid life as the characters make their introductions. Among these is the first film’s most clueless chucklehead, Lydia’s stepmother, Delia (O’Hara), an arty artist with an outsize ego and cruel lack of talent. Lydia is on warmer terms with her, partly because she needs someone on her side, given that her father is soon dead; he’s dispatched early in a satisfyingly bloody animated sequence. (The character was played in the first film by Jeffrey Jones, who pleaded guilty in 2010 to not updating his registration as a sex offender.)Her father’s death becomes the excuse for Lydia and the rest to return to the family’s old shrieking ground, a hillside fun house with an airy porch and troublesome pests. Once there, Burton cuts loose his cheerfully malignant clowns, and the characters settle down to business with magic portals and visitors from beyond. In bland strokes, Burton et al. also toss in a few romantic complications, partly, it seems, because someone here believes that female characters require love interests. One entanglement involves Lydia and her producer-boyfriend, Rory (Justin Theroux, farcically insufferable), a mindful kick-me-sign; the other, less developed one concerns Astrid and a local cutie, Jeremy (Arthur Conti).I don’t know why anyone thought that Beetlejuice needed any kind of love interest outside Lydia, his old crush. Whatever the case, Monica Bellucci turns up as his ex, the latest in a line of showy Burton vixens. Given her character’s soul-sucking toxicity, it’s hard not to wonder if the filmmakers are making a joke about bad divorces. Bellucci doesn’t have much to do but look hot, which is easy. Like Willem Dafoe — who’s predictably diverting playing a hammy (totally canned) dead actor — Bellucci is attractive filigree, something to admire amid the chats, chuckles and appealingly humble practical effects that still carry the touch of the human hand.The greatest special effect remains Keaton’s Beetlejuice, however attenuated. The original movie was at once a funfair and a comic family meltdown with heart (and other body parts), but what pushed it joyously over the top was Keaton. With his deathly white face and electric-chair shock of hair, Beetlejuice had been designed to seize your attention (and maybe evoke Jack Nicholson in “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest”). What held you rapt, though, was Keaton’s exciting expressive range and unpredictability. With his wild eyes and raspy growl, he pushed and pulled at your affections, and made you wonder about the guy under the get-up. He seemed borderline dangerous, which gave the film frisson. Even as “Beetlejuice” playfully hit its genre notes, Keaton’s vocalizations — he spat words and all but scatted — and his twitchy physicality kept the film from slipping into the generic.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 75 Shares83 Views

      in Movies

      Michael Keaton Michael Keaton Michael Keaton

      by

      There’s a scene in the upcoming indie dramedy “Goodrich” where Michael Keaton’s character, a Los Angeles art dealer lost in the weeds of a late-midlife crisis, agrees to attend a breath workshop to win over a New Age-y prospective client. As setups go, it’s something of a soft target: a fish-out-of-water Boomer, drowning in California woo-woo.But the actor, his face a small hurricane of hope and anxiety, does more than find his “higher vibration.” He bobs and weaves and tries some kind of freestyle tai chi; he bats at a swarm of invisible bees and unleashes a primal scream (more like a strangled yelp, really). This is the Keaton that the “Goodrich” writer-director Hallie Meyers-Shyer envisioned when she conceived the screenplay.“I wrote it 100 percent with him in mind,” she said, “to the point where if he had said no, I would have buried it and myself in the backyard.”And it’s the same sense of unpredictability, a certain wild-card gleam, that has compelled the filmmaker Tim Burton to cast Keaton in five movies over nearly four decades, including, most recently, “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice.” “When you just look at Michael in ‘Beetlejuice’ or even ‘Batman,’ he has this sort of look in his eye,” Burton said. “That’s why I wanted him to be Batman, because you just look at him and go, ‘This is a guy who would dress up like a bat.’ You know what I mean? There’s something behind the eyes that’s just very intelligent, funny and dangerous and kind of crazy.”Winona Ryder and Michael Keaton, who both starred in the original “Beetlejuice” movie, return for “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice.”Warner Bros.The Keaton who settled into the corner booth of a hushed midtown Manhattan hotel lounge on a late-August morning didn’t seem like much of a maniac. Dressed in the dapper cool-dad uniform of fine-gauge knitwear and fitted slacks, he was still whippet-slim at 72 (he turned 73 on Thursday), and so soft-spoken in person that it was sometimes a strain to hear him over the cappuccino machine.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 113 Shares156 Views

      in Movies

      ‘Beetlejuice’ Sequel With Jenna Ortega Premieres at Venice Film Festival

      by

      After the actors’ strike muted the 2023 edition, this year’s event is being powered by stars like the “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice” actress and her castmates.On Wednesday morning, several hours before Tim Burton’s “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice” opened the Venice Film Festival, dozens of young people were already camped out by the Palazzo del Cinema in the hopes of seeing one of the film’s stars.As I surveyed the scene, a teenage boy pulled up on a bicycle, accompanied by his parents. All three craned their necks to check out the still-empty red carpet. “Jenna Ortega is going to be here?” asked his father.The boy nodded shyly and his parents exchanged grins. “That’s his great love, you know,” the father said.Just as casting Ortega, the popular star of “Wednesday,” helped juice interest in Burton’s sequel, so too do glamorous movie stars turbocharge a film festival. Last year, Venice had to make do with precious few A-listers since the actors’ strike barred anyone who had appeared in a big-studio film from doing press for it.That meant the Zendaya tennis romance “Challengers,” planned as the glamorous opening salvo for last year’s festival, was yanked from the lineup and replaced by the Italian war drama “Comandante.” While that movie had its scattered highlights, it didn’t exactly have teenagers lining up for it at 11 in the morning.At a news conference Wednesday afternoon, the festival’s artistic director Alberto Barbera recalled experiencing “this terrible feeling — this bereavement, if you like” when the strike sapped his event of its opening film and most of its stars.“It was a great blow we were dealt,” he said. “There was a lot of concern, of course, that the lack of the talent may somehow undermine the efficacy of the machinery of this festival, which is also associated with strong promotion.”In other words, while cinema is the lifeblood of any film festival, celebrity is what really sells it. Barbera asserted that this year’s starry schedule will be the exact opposite of the previous edition: “We have the longest list of talent attending, who will actually walk along our red carpet, in years.”The “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice” news conference provided a fitting sneak preview of what’s to come: When Ortega, 21, took the dais alongside Michael Keaton, Winona Ryder and the rest of the cast, she said it was she who felt intimidated by the others’ combined star power.“I just kind of tried to mind my business in the corner,” Ortega said, “making sure I didn’t rip off the lovely Winona’s work from back in the day.”The sequel needed more than 35 years to mount in part because of the busy schedules of Burton and his big stars. Knowing that, would the director ever consider a third installment?“Let’s do the math,” he said wryly. “It took 35 years to do this one, so I’ll be 100. I guess it’s possible, with medical science these days, but I don’t think so.” More

    • 150 Shares159 Views

      in Movies

      Tim Burton, Michael Keaton and More Share How ‘Beetlejuice’ Sequel Came Together

      by

      Michael Keaton, Winona Ryder, Catherine O’Hara and their director, Tim Burton, look back on the first movie, the “Day-O” scene and their ghost comedy’s afterlife.If you wonder why it took 36 years for “Beetlejuice” to spawn a sequel, consider how complicated it was simply to reunite its busy principals for a video call last month.The director Tim Burton joined from the south of France, where he was editing the second season of the Netflix series “Wednesday,” while Winona Ryder signed on from Atlanta, on a brief break from filming the final season of “Stranger Things.” Michael Keaton spent the call roaming a cabin he’d built in rural Montana — “I’m reheating coffee, if you want some,” he told the group — while Catherine O’Hara, the last to sign on, did so from her cottage in Ontario, Canada.Still, even on a video call that catered to a torturous number of time zones, the quartet’s comic chemistry remained strong. Ryder said revisiting their decades-old bond was the best part of making “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice,” which opens the Venice Film Festival on Wednesday before its theatrical release Sept. 6.“It was nostalgic, but not in any saccharine sense,” Ryder said. “It went straight to the heart.”In the 1988 original, the newly dead couple Barbara and Adam Maitland (Geena Davis and Alec Baldwin) marshal all their ghostly might in an attempt to scare away the Deetzes, city slickers who’ve moved into their Connecticut house. Eccentric hauntings ensue, including a memorable dinner-party possession where Delia Deetz (O’Hara) lurches in time to Harry Belafonte’s “Day-O.” But when the Maitlands go looking for added firepower, they make the mistake of hiring Beetlejuice (Keaton), a trickster spirit who plays by his own rules and has romantic designs on the Deetzes’ daughter, the dark and morbid Lydia (Ryder).From left, Keaton, Catherine O’Hara, Ryder and the director Tim Burton, all participants from the original film, in New York to promote the sequel.Theo Wargo/Getty ImagesThe new film picks up decades later as Lydia, now the host of an exploitative paranormal-reality series, heads back home with her stepmother, Delia, and skeptical daughter, Astrid (Jenna Ortega), in tow. Meanwhile, Beetlejuice lies in wait, still pining for the goth girl that got away.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More