New extended footage of Beetlejuice 2 from CinemaCon gives more context to how Michael Keaton’s character returns, including a confirmation of which character summons him with the dreaded three-word phrase. While teasing their upcoming slate of movies in 2024 and early 2025, Warner Bros. released extended footage of Beetlejuice Beetlejuice at CinemaCon, with the Tim Burton sequel scheduled to premiere in theaters on September 6, 2024. Though much of the footage was similar to what was included in the first trailer, it included a few shocking new details about the new and returning Beetlejuice 2 characters’ interactions with Michael Keaton’s titular poltergeist.
The first teaser trailer for Tim Burton’s Beetlejuice Beetlejuice revealed the Deetz family reuniting in Winter River after the death of Jeffrey Jones’ Charles Deetz, which concluded with a shot of Beetlejuice being summoned in front of a shocked Lydia. At the time, it wasn’t clear who had actually repeated Beetlejuice’s name three times before he rose from the town model in the attic, with the reason for calling him still remaining a mystery. However, the new footage finally reveals the iconic character who summons him in Beetlejuice 2, which comes as a huge surprise after the events of the 1988 original movie.
Now, new footage from Beetlejuice 2 confirms that Lydia Deetz summons Michael Keaton’s character in the sequel. According to the teaser, Winona Ryder’s Lydia states, “I can’t believe I’m doing this,” before saying his name three times. Consequently, her shocked face as he rises from the attic seems to be based on the notion that the summoning worked and she now has to face the character again, not simply a reaction to the idea that he returned. While there were theories that Astrid was responsible for summoning him after stumbling upon Adam and Barbara Maitland’s town model in Beetlejuice 2‘s trailer, Lydia being the culprit means his return was no accident.
At the end of Beetlejuice‘s original movie, it was also Winona Ryder’s Lydia Deetz who summoned him to the realm of the living. This means that Lydia has summoned Michael Keaton’s character twice now, which she wouldn’t do unless someone she loved was in grave danger. The only reason teenage Lydia summoned Beetlejuice in the 1988 film was because Adam and Barbara were dying from Otho’s accidental exorcism, and she believed Keaton’s “bio-exorcist” was the only one who could save them. With Lydia now being a mother to Jenna Ortega’s teenage Astrid in Beetlejuice 2, it seems more than likely that her decision to summon Beetlejuice again has to do with her daughter’s life being in danger.
Apparently like Lydia herself, audiences will initially have a hard time believing that she’s summoning him again after all the chaos he caused in the original movie. After teenage Lydia summoned Beetlejuice, he tried to force her into marrying him so that he could permanently remain in the realm of the living, and tried to harm the Maitlands on numerous occasions. Knowing that Keaton’s character would go to any lengths possible to break his banishment, it’s difficult to understand why Lydia would expose her teenage daughter to the possibility of Beetlejuice trying to do the same thing to Astrid.
The official synopsis for Beetlejuice 2 explains that trouble brews in both the realms of the living and the dead, so the best potential explanation for Lydia summoning Beetlejuice again would be that she’s trying to save Astrid from danger in the afterlife. With Adam and Barbara missing from Beetlejuice 2‘s story and Lydia no longer being able to rely on them for help in the afterlife, it seems like Michael Keaton’s character was her last resort in trying to find help from the dead. Even more terrifying, it suggests that there’s a force more dangerous to Astrid, Lydia, and the Deetz family members than Beetlejuice himself.