‘Beetlejuice 2’: Michael Keaton says he’s begun to engage

Fans of the 1988 supernatural comedy “Beetlejuice” will recall that the way to summon Michael Keaton’s titular ghost is to repeatedly invoke his name. Now Keaton himself is taking a similar approach to a sequel.

During a press junket for the new “RoboCop” remake, Keaton told MTV News that he’s interested in reuniting with director Tim Burton to make “Beetlejuice 2.”

“I’ve e-mailed Tim a couple of times, talked to the writer a couple of times, but all really, really preliminary stuff,” Keaton told MTV. “I always said that’s the one thing I’d like to do again, if I ever did anything again. But it kind of required Tim to be involved some way or another.”

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Rumors of a sequel have circulated for years, and Seth Grahame-Smith has been working on a script since at least 2012. Grahame-Smith previously worked on the Burton-produced “Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter” and the Burton-directed “Dark Shadows,” both for Warner Bros., where “Beetlejuice” resides.

Keaton has indeed spoken of his fondness for “Beetlejuice” in the past. In 2011, he told The Times, “From an art perspective, I don’t know how you get better than ‘Beetlejuice.’ In terms of originality and a look, it’s 100% unique. If you consider the process of taking something from someone’s mind — meaning Tim — and putting it on the screen, I think that movie is incomparable.”

With roles in “RoboCop,” which opened Wednesday, and the upcoming films “Need for Speed” and “Birdman,” Keaton seems to be angling for something of a career comeback. That last movie, a comedy directed by Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, has shades of Keaton’s own life, as it tells the story of a waning actor famous for playing a superhero, as Keaton did in Burton’s “Batman.” Between that and a “Beetlejuice” sequel, Keaton could be out to remind audiences of his past hits.

Burton, meanwhile, has completed shooting the Weinstein Co.’s “Big Eyes,” about kitsch artist Margaret Keane and her credit-stealing husband, starring Amy Adams and Christoph Waltz. But there’s not yet believed to be a script for “Beetlejuice 2,” and Burton in any event could next be shooting an adaptation of Ransom Riggs’ supernatural tale “Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children,” which Fox is scheduled to release in July 2015.

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