Tim Burton didn't want to "tick any boxes" by re-casting Alec Baldwin and Geena Davis in the 'Beetlejuice' sequel. The pair played ghost couple Adam and Barbara Maitland from the original 1988 flick, but the filmmaker didn't feel their presence was necessary for the story he wanted to tell in 'Beetlejuice Beetlejuice', which focuses on the Deetz family. He told PEOPLE: “I think the thing was for me I didn’t want to just tick any boxes.
“So even though they were such an amazing integral part of the first one, I was focusing on something else.” Adam and Barbara summoned the titular trickster ghoul, who is played by Michael Keaton, after they drowned in a river and became ghosts. They get Beetlejuice to scare away the new family that moved into their home.
Charlie and Delia Deetz can’t see them, but their death-obsessed daughter Lydia can. Winona Ryder and Catherine O'Hara have reprised their roles as Lydia and Delia, while Jenna Ortega plays the former's daughter Astrid Deetz. Burton added: “A sequel like this, it really had to do with the time.
“That was my hook into it, the three generations of mother, daughter, granddaughter. And that [would] be the nucleus of it. I couldn’t have made this personally back in 1989 or whatever.
” Time has moved on with Lydia now a mother herself, and Winona recently admitted she initially struggled to see Lydia move beyond her gothic phase to become a parent. She told Slash Film: “I think certainly, I never pictured Lydia ei.