Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is doing pretty damn well at the box office, proving moviegoers will still show up in droves for Tim Burton doing spooky things on screens.
Michael Keaton is back, having secured an agreement that the movie keep the effects as practical as possible, while some – but notably not other members – of the cast of the previous movie have also returned.
All things considered it’s going pretty well for Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, though some fans are pointing out a detail in the movie which is making them worry that it’s a bit more of a problem than it first appears.
Jenna Ortega’s character Astrid Deetz is the daughter of Lydia (Winona Ryder), the protagonist of the first Beetlejuice movie.
In the sequel, Astrid gets a possible love interest in the form of Jeremy, who appears to be a kid her age but is actually a ghost who died a couple of decades previously.
Some fans have cottoned onto the timings and ages, noting that if Jeremy looks to be around Astrid’s age but has been dead for over 20 years ‘that’d put Jeremy in his mid-40s roughly and Astrid round 15-16’.
Boy meets girl, but he’s also dead and a ghost and about 40-ish (Warner Bros)
Certain viewers were waiting for the movie to ‘mention the age gap between Astrid and the ghost boy’, but in lieu of that they’re mentioning it themselves.
They’re finding the age gap between a girl and a ghost to be quite weird considering he’s secretly quite a bit older than she is.
Then again, as Beetlejuice Beetlejuice gets going, there’s more revelations about Jeremy the ghost to be made which we’ll keep a secret in case you’ve not yet been to a cinema to watch it.
This isn’t new to the Beetlejuice movies, as the original film had an age gap where the ‘Ghost with the Most’ was trying to marry Winona Ryder’s character when she was a teenage girl.
There’s been plenty of discussion over the years on the age gap in the previous movie (Warner Bros)
He is just doing it so he can have free rein in the mortal world, but things might have changed since then.
In the sequel (and it’s a shot that makes it into the trailer) you can see the spooky spirit has still got a picture of her as a teenager on his desk.
Speaking to Entertainment Weekly, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice screenwriter Alfred Gough commented on how jarring it could be watching the original, he said: “As you know, when you watch something again 30 years old, you’re like, ‘Wow! We were all okay with that in the ’80s’.
“You forget sometimes, even when you show these movies you love to your kids. You’re like, ‘Oh! That’s a little questionable.’ But I think it is fun to not do a couple of those things [in the sequel].”
