Michael Keaton Says a Prayer-Answering Beetlejuice 2 Might Not Happen

Sorry Beetlejuice fans, but Michael Keaton is not convinced that a sequel to the Tim Burton movie will ever or should ever happen.

“It’s possible that ship has sailed,” he told Variety. He added that he wasn’t sure they should even attempt a sequel to the 1988 cult classic, said the actor getting ready to star in Spider-Man: Homecoming. “The only way to do it is to do it right,” he said. “So much of it was improvised and so much was beautifully handmade by the artist that is Tim Burton. If you can’t get close to that, you leave it alone.”

That said, Keaton also admitted that he had no insider information about the actual state of the sequel: “Zero. You always hear things, that this is happening, and people seem to know more about it than I do.”

Rumors about a possible sequel have circulated for years, and screenwriter Seth Grahame-Smith reportedly wrote the script specifically so Keaton could reprise his role as the ghost with the most. Just last year, Winona Ryder said that Beetlejuice 2 was happening (albeit that was before her career was re-invigorated thanks to her work in Netflix’s Stranger Things.)

But then in May, Tim Burton explained that while he had spoken with both Keaton and Ryder about it, there was no sequel in the works. “It’s something that I really would like to do in the right circumstances, but it’s one of those films where it has to be right,” the filmmaker said during a press junket for Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children. “It’s not a kind of a movie that cries out [for a sequel], it’s not the Beetlejuice trilogy. So it’s something that if the elements are right–because I do love the character and Michael [Keaton] is amazing as that character, so yeah we’ll see. But there’s nothing concrete yet.”

According to Keaton, there may never be anything concrete. Of course, Beetlejuice is a ghost story, so the sequel could have a second life after being declared dead.

[H/T Cinemablend]