SPOILER WARNING: This article contains spoilers for “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice,” in theaters now.

When Tim Burton asked to speak to “Wednesday” writers Al Gough and Miles Millar after a long day of filming in Romania, the duo assumed they were in deep trouble.

“After packing, he would usually sit in his car and be gone,” Gough recalls. “So at first we thought something was wrong: ‘Oh shit, what happened?’”

It turned out that Burton wanted to pitch them a fairly large project: the sequel to his beloved 1988 supernatural fantasy film, “Beetlejuice.” Gough and Millar immediately agreed and went to work with Burton to further develop the story.

“We’ve done a lot of sequels, and it’s always about trying to figure out why the sequel should exist,” Millar says. “Why is this a movie, rather than just a piece of merchandise, because we can make a lot of money as a studio. You have to have integrity and say something.”

He and Gough had previously cracked the code for a strong second film by writing 2004’s critically acclaimed Spider-Man 2. According to Millar, the key to Beetlejuice Beetlejuice was finding the right balance between social satire and sincerity in the original.

The new film instead focuses on three generations of Deetz women: Delia (Catherine O’Hara), Lydia (Winona Ryder) and Astrid (Jenna Ortega). “I was just thinking, it’s really about those women and the horrible men in their lives, right? Beetlejuice with Lydia, Jeremy (Arthur Conti) with Astrid, and Rory (Justin Theroux) with Lydia, too,” Gough says.

“The first film said something about the culture of the time: Yuppies moving to the countryside! It’s a gentrification film in many ways,” Millar adds. In the 2024 update, Theroux brings some modern smarmyness, while his character Rory appropriately uses therapy language to take advantage of those around him.

As for the crucial element at the heart of the film, Gough and Millar didn’t want to simply rehash the original. That’s partly why ghost couple Adam and Barbara Maitland (Alec Baldwin and Geena Davis) are absent from the sequel. “Tim had said up front that he didn’t want the Maitlands in it. I think part of it is because they’re ghosts, so they wouldn’t age,” Gough says. “There was a point where we tried to do it, but it just felt like fan service, honestly. That story had been told.”

While Gough, Millar and Burton had just wrapped up Ortega’s work on “Wednesday,” her character in “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice” couldn’t be more different from the macabre “Addams Family” icon. “We didn’t want to make her a Wednesday, and we didn’t want her to feel like a Winona clone,” Gough says. “Winona’s character was open to weirdness and weirdness as a teenager. Astrid says, ‘I believe in what I can see: facts and science. She’s a little bit bloody-hearted about her causes, but one of those causes isn’t her mother.'”

At the end of the film, Astrid is do meet her mother – and what better way to show off their new bond than with a crazy dance scene?

Harry Belafonte’s “Day-O” appears early in the film (sung by a choir at Charles’ funeral), harking back to the memorable dinner scene from the original film. Millar and Gough knew they wanted to create a similar musical scene in the sequel, but felt a lot of pressure to match what its predecessor did. “For us as writers, the ‘Day-O’ sequence in the first film was so iconic,” Millar says. “It was always like we had this fear in the back of our minds: How are we going to top that?”

They found their answer during the film’s climax, when Beetlejuice crashes Lydia’s wedding to Rory and demands that she honor her side of the marriage contract she signed earlier in the film. The wedding scene from the first film, while fondly remembered by fans, is actually a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moment.

“It lasts about five seconds, and then Geena Davis comes in on the sandworm, and he’s done,” Gough says. “What’s he going to do with the second chance to get married?”

Turn on the music. “We got to the end of the movie and we all wanted a musical number, but we couldn’t come up with anything,” Gough recalls. “Tim called us and said he had a jukebox in his kitchen. ‘I’ve been listening to the song “MacArthur Park.” What if we use that as the central song in the wedding scene?'”

And off they went, performing the original 1968 Richard Harris version of the song (Donna Summer made the song a disco hit in 1978), with Lydia, Beetlejuice, Astrid, Rory and even the priest singing along and showing off their best moves.

“It’s a seven-and-a-half-minute song. So at first we thought, maybe we don’t need these parts? And Tim said, ‘No, we’re going to use everything,'” Gough says. “It’s the kind of crazy thing that the movie needed. Once we got the story down and the structures, you could make these big moves and it felt like they fit the movie. It was so ‘Beetlejuice.’ When you’re in the movie and you think it’s going to end in a million ways, I don’t think ‘MacArthur Park’ would ever be on your bingo card.”

The length of the sequence also gave the creative team the opportunity to weave even more characters into the song. “I especially love when the song completely shifts gears and[Willem]Dafoe comes out of the crypt in this crazy ’70s orchestral break in the middle of the song,” says Millar. “It’s really incredibly theatrical as a song.”

While that wedding is certainly one of the film’s most exciting moments, it’s actually not the only time we see Beetlejuice participate in a wedding ceremony. Earlier in the film, his backstory is revealed when the audience sees him marry the terrifying Delores (Monica Bellucci).

It marks the first time audiences will see a young Beetlejuice plundering tombs hundreds of years ago, in a black-and-white scene narrated entirely in Italian.

“We knew he was old, so we thought, ‘Oh, that’s the era he would live in,'” says Gough. “It was actually Tim’s idea to say, ‘Let’s do it all in Italian!'”

“I think he said it’s the prologue to a Fellini film,” Millar adds with a laugh.

Despite fleshing out their “agent of chaos,” the creative team was determined to preserve Beetlejuice’s limited screen time. Keaton appears in the 1988 film for just 17 minutes, and the sequel isn’t much different in that regard.

“He’s such a fun character to write, but … he’s not the main character of the movie,” Millar says. “It was a tricky balance. People love him so much. It’s called ‘Beetlejuice Beetlejuice’ for a reason, so he has to be essential to the movie.”

Gough and Millar say that challenge influenced their writing, resulting in a script they’re proud of (with just now (enough Beetlejuice). “It makes you think harder about what those scenes are going to be, and what his contribution to the movie is,” Millar says. “It feels incredibly satisfying, and like you’ve spent a lot more time with him than you think. That’s the magic of that character.”