Tim Burton explained Alec Baldwin and Geena Davis‘ absence from his Beetlejuice sequel this week.
Though Burton brought back original stars Winona Ryder, Catherina O’Hara and Michael Keaton for Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, his 2024 follow-up to the 1988 classic, Baldwin and Davis do not return.
“I think the thing was for me I didn’t want to just tick any boxes,” Burton told People. “So even though they were such an amazing integral part of the first one, I was focusing on something else.”
In the original film, Baldwin and Davis played Adam and Barbara Maitland, a recently deceased couple confined to the Connecticut house where they used to live when at odds with the home’s new residents, the Deetz family: Charles (Jeffrey Jones) his daughter Lydia (Ryder) and Charles’s wife Delia (O’Hara).
In Beetlejuice Beetlejuice — which wowed audiences during its Venice Film Fest premiere on Wednesday — Jenna Ortega plays Lydia’s teenage daughter who accidentally reopens the door to the afterlife.
“A sequel like this, it really had to do with the time,” Burton continued. “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.”
Davis previously told Entertainment Tonight in April that her theory was she was not returning because “ghosts don’t age.”
Beetlejuice Beetlejuice will release in theaters Sept. 6.