What is Dead May Never Die
The era of zombie IP bravely soldiers on with trailers for 'Beetlejuice Beetlejuice' and 'Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F.'
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FILE UNDER: Timely Gripes
Hey, remember that thing from when you were a kid? They killed it and they're using its corpse as a sock puppet to sell you stuff! Awesome sauce!
This is maybe the oldest man opinion I’ve ever expressed on here before, but: I feel like basic shame used to prevent things like this (that, and maybe artists being properly compensated for their work). I’m writing, of course, of the 30-years-too-late sequel to Beetlejuice, for which they’ve just released a trailer. It’s called… (*long sigh*) Beetlejuice Beetlejuice.
Beetlejuice exists just on the edge of my conscious memories, and I’m over 40. That’s more than old enough to feel like a hypocrite any time I bash something simply for having the audacity to age, but I think my objection here comes less from the fact that it’s old (Beetlejuice came out in 1988, more than 30 years ago) and more from how sad it all feels. I don’t want to credit anyone for the “idea,” but I feel like you could take the basic concept of a Beetlejuice sequel and make it look less like a Super Bowl commercial for insurance than this.
Beetlejuice Beetlejuice Beetlejuice!
MICHAEL KEATON AS BEETLEJUICE: Did you know that with just 15 minutes, you could save a bundle on car insurance?!
Guess what! We brought back Winona Ryder! And she’s even got the same haircut!
Because hey, if there’s one thing I know about 50-something mall goths, it’s that they all have exactly the same haircuts they had in 1989. Christ, man. Not even Robert Smith from The Cure has the same haircut he had in 1989. Wait no, bad example.
I’d be remiss if I didn’t note that the trailer opens — opens! — with a slowed down dramatic cover of “Day-O” (a few seconds of it that oddly never repeat again). It’s been a full nine years since I thought I’d amassed enough examples of the “slowed down dramatic cover” in movie trailers phenomenon to make fun of it in a trend piece. I was about to say “Day-O” was at least a pretty deep pull in that department until I remembered it was just a reference to the original.
Is there a single choice in this that isn’t groan-inducingly predictable? I guess I was naive to think that a CGI Harold Ramis showing up to give a thumb’s up to the production from beyond the grave at the end of the last Ghostbusters would be the most tasteless riff on an eighties movie.
Trailers aren’t movies and blah blah blah, but it sure looks as if there is absolutely no second layer to this thing beyond “hey, remember that?” And they think that you’re so stupid that you won’t reconize Winona Ryder’s character unless she has exactly the same haircut. This is a movie for people who lack object permanence.
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Ahh, but that’s not all: the same day has given us a brand new Netflix trailer for Beverly Hills Cop 4.
Sorry, I misspoke. This one is actually called Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F, which sounds like a promo code you type in to get 20% off on new socks.
Oh and hey, wouldn’t you know it, he’s still wearing the Detroit Lions letterman jacket. Makes sense! Every time I hang out with one of my parent’s friends they’re always wearing trademark clothing they’ve had for the last 40 years. If there was any verisimilitude in this enterprise that jacket would smell worse than the stage clothes the singer of the Norwegian black metal band Mayhem used to bury and then dig up before going on stage.
Ah, but there’s Bronson Pinchot! And Judge Reinhold! And that guy who played Taggart! (And Paul Reiser too, but I’m never happy to see that pathologically tedious real-life Kenny Bania). I’m always happy when forgotten character actors get that one last bag, but I’m also old enough to remember how inexplicably awful Beverly Hills Cop 3 was. And that was 30 years ago.
I was about to type “do we really need this,” but it feels too obvious. Of course we don’t. But to some exec somewhere, this feels like the easiest money, the most conservative business decision, the most obvious way to “leverage existing IP” (a phrase that makes me want to put a gun in my mouth). An entire strategy which rests on willfully ignoring the obvious fact that the only people old enough to remember this IP are the same ones inclined to be kind of sick of it.
And again, maybe if they approached it with any kind of real thought towards how Axel Foley might’ve changed in the last 30 years it might be interesting. Instead, nope, we get the same jacket and going through all the same motions in a sad attempt to remind you of a thing.
I try to laugh at the silliness of it all (to some extent dedicated a career to it) but it’s getting hard not to feel like the movie business is running on the same dumb inertia powering everything else. Foreign policy chasing the ghosts of the Cold War for inexplicable reasons. An impending election between two handsy senile used car salesmen. The so-called brand new technology desperately trying to copy an 11-year-old movie.
The classic defense of the status quo goes something like, how could it be any different? It has always been this way.
Luckily this week comes with its own perfect counterexample: Furiosa. Here’s a movie that’s also a sequel (the fifth) to an even older movie — Mad Max, which came out in 1979.
And yet… What’s the first thing you notice about Furiosa, even if you haven’t seen it (which you should, it rips)?
No Toecutter, no Feral Child, no Mel Gibson in leathers, no Lord Humungus, not even any Tom Hardy grunting or Charlize Theron driving a war rig. If George Miller was American, you just know Furiosa would be called “Maddest Max: Rockatansky Returns” or some shit, starring a 68-year-old Mel Gibson hobbling around a V8 Interceptor before the Gyro Captain returns for a big cameo and everyone is expected to clap like seals.
Luckily he’s not, and so we get a fifth sequel that… acknowledges the passage of time. Embraces the evolution of the concept. Gets inspired by trying to imagine how that concept would’ve changed instead of forcing us to do the mental gymnastics required to pretend everything is still the same.
At a certain point, our inability to let go is keeping us from having anything new. I dunno, just a thought.
My last semester in college I took what was supposed to be a blowoff class: pop culture in the 20th century. It turned out to be hugely instructive and important.
The professor said that Boomers were the first generation to have disposable income as teenagers and be catered to when they were young so it created a strong nostalgic streak. And that nostalgia only got stronger as things became more tumultuous. The professor predicted that Millennials would be even MORE into nostalgia than Boomers because Boomers raised us and the likelihood of even greater socioeconomic instability to come. This was in the Spring of 2009.
Not to write my OWN essay here but movies like the Beetlejuice sequel are fun in theory and will at some point feature AI versions of the original characters so you don’t have to deal with the depressing passage of time but ultimately they won’t be able to recapture what made these movies exciting at the time which was how they fit in and helped define pop culture through their originality.
It’s a total ouroboros. Instead of finding the 2024 version of Tim Burton to make the 2024 equivalent of Beetlejuice we just get a shambling corpse reanimated by harnessing the sweaty desperation of David Zaslav’s need to EBITDA goals or face a golden parachute.
On the bright side, we've entered the Auteur-as-Brand era. So in between the dreck, we'll at least be getting coherent, singular visions from high-end directors, writers and publishers. Barbie and Oppenheimer being the exemplars of this last year. Furiosa, Nosferatu, whatever Jordan Peele and Ari Aster are cooking up, plus any releases from A24 and Annapurna. It also means the return of the mid-budget film, which is a blessing. Let the piggies have their slop; I'll be jacking off in the back of the next Challengers screening.