Tim Burton’s Beetlejuice Beetlejuice has grossed $264 million at the worldwide box office in its first two weeks of release, marking a smash hit not only for the director and his cast, but also for Warner Bros. Motion Picture Group co-chairs Michael De Luca and Pamela Abdy. The duo took over the film studio in 2022, and the long-awaited sequel to Beetlejuice was their first Warner Bros. film to be entirely under their supervision, from development to release.
“Dancing in the aisles, smiles on the faces,” De Luca recently told the New York Times about his reaction to the sequel’s success. “There’s really nothing better for morale than a hit.”
Burton and the studio had been tossing around ideas for a sequel to Beetlejuice for over a decade (it was widely reported that one of the scrapped ideas was Beetlejuice Goes Hawaiian), and according to The Times, there was a moment during development when the studio tried to push Beetlejuice Beetlejuice through as a streaming exclusive on Max.
“That would never have worked for Tim,” Abdy said of producing the “Beetlejuice” sequel for streaming. “You’re talking about a visionary artist whose films need to be seen on the big screen.”
The big point of contention between Burton and the studio was that the planned budget for Beetlejuice was at one point around $147 million, largely due to “star salaries and producer fees.” De Luca and Abdy then approached Burton and said he could make the sequel exclusively for theaters as long as he kept the budget under $100 million. Together they greenlit Beetlejuice for $99 million, with Burton and cast members Michael Keaton, Winona Ryder, Jenna Ortega and Catherine O’Hara agreeing to less money up front but substantial post-production deals that will surely pay off now that the sequel is a box office hit.
“Beetlejuice” has since topped the domestic box office charts for two weekends in a row, grossing just over $50 million in its second weekend of release. The film will soon cross the $200 million mark in the U.S. For more from De Luca and Abdy on the film’s development, visit the Times website.
