The Beetlejuice 2 Trailer Knows How Tired We Are of Trailer Cliches
The juice is loose. Again.
Legacyquels to ‘80s movies are all the rage lately. Despite decades passing since they first hit theaters, franchises like Top Gun and Ghostbusters are getting a new lease on life thanks to large-scale blockbusters that continue the story and capitalize on the nostalgia for their first installments. While this formula usually works for action-packed, crowd-pleasing adventures, 2024’s Beetlejuice sequel, aptly titled Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, is more of a gamble.
Ahead of its September 5th release, we now have our first look at Tim Burton’s take on the afterlife, and it proves the original movie’s self-aware tone hasn’t gone anywhere. Check out the full teaser below.
Beetlejuice Beetlejuice follows three generations of Deetz women: Delia, the fashionable stepmother played by Catherine O’Hara, Lydia, the “strange and unusual” daughter played by Winona Ryder, and Astrid, Winona’s daughter, played by Gen Z scream queen Jenna Ortega. We get our first look at Astrid while a boys’ choir at a funeral sings “Day-O,” the Harry Belafonte song the ghosts made the Deetzes sing during a dinner party in the original film.
The use of slow, moody covers of on-the-nose songs, so-called “trailercore” songs, has been a trend in Hollywood for decades. Popularized by The Social Network’s cover of “Creep,” it’s since popped up again and again, from “I’ve Got No Strings” in the Avengers: Age of Ultron trailer, “End of the World” in the Eternals trailer, and “What a Wonderful World” in seemingly every trailer for a dystopian or apocalyptic story (including Eternals, which really milked the concept).
The Beetlejuice Beetlejuice trailer uses an old cliche in a very funny way.
But Beetlejuice Beetlejuice’s teaser doesn’t play “Day-O” over nostalgic images of Astrid biking through the covered bridge that killed the Maitlands and uncovering the model town where Beetlejuice seemingly has laid dormant for decades. Instead, by treating the weirdest scene in Beetlejuice as a somber funeral dirge, it’s a fun, silly gag.
Beetlejuice Beetlejuice seems very aware of its status as a legacyquel, and all the tropes that come with it — the callbacks, references, and strangely reverential attitudes to even the silliest movies. That tone is perfect for a follow-up to Tim Burton’s raunchy take on the classic ghost story. Let’s just hope that goofy trailer songs aren’t the only sequel cliche Beetlejuice Beetlejuice ultimately buries.
