Beetlejuice 2 Reportedly in the Works With Original Cast and Jenna Ortega

Jenna Ortega could go from the Addams Family to the Deetzes. The Wednesday star has an offer to play the daughter of Winona Ryder’s Lydia Deetz in Beetlejuice 2, The Ankler insider Jeff Sneider reports. According to Sneider, the long-in-the-works follow-up to director Tim Burton’s 1988 Beetlejuice is “finally a go” with Burton reuniting with original cast members Michael Keaton as “bio-exorcist” Betelgeuse, Ryder as goth girl Lydia, and Catherine O’Hara as Lydia’s step-mother, Delia Deetz. In February 2022, The Ankler‘s Hollywood Transom newsletter reported that the Beetlejuice sequel was in motion with Brad Pitt’s Plan B producing.

Ortega rose to fame as the lead of the Disney Channel series Stuck in the Middle before joining Netflix’s stalker-thriller You. Most famously, she starred as Wednesday Addams in the Burton-directed and produced Wednesday for Netflix and as Tara Carpenter in 2022’s Scream, a role she reprises in Scream VI.

Asked about a Beetlejuice 2 in an October interview, Burton told Deadline that “nothing is out of the question.”

“I only know if I’m making a film when I’m actually on the setshooting,” Burton teased of the sequel to his 1988 cult classic that also starred Alec Baldwin and Geena Davis. “I try to go back to the root of everything. It springs from aseed and then it grows, rather than out of these statements. I am working on ideas and things but it’s all very early days. We’llset how it goes. How’s that for a none answer?”

A sequel has been in various stages of development since 1990. In 2013, Ryder told The Daily Beast the long-rumored sequel — set decades after the original in real time — “sounds like it might be happening.”

“It’s not a remake. It’s 27 years later,” Ryder said at the time. “And I have to say, I love Lydia [Deetz] so much. She was such a huge part of me. I would be really interested in what she is doing 27 years later.”

Ryder added she would not return for Beetlejuice 2 without Burton and Keaton, whose pre-Batman collaboration grossed nearly $75 million against a budget of $15 million. “I would never go near [a sequel] if it was not Tim and Michael,” she said. “Because those guys, I love.”

Ortega can next be seen in Scream VI, in theaters Friday.