I Think I Figured Out Beetlejuice Beetlejuice’s Weirdly Confusing Ending

It all ties back to one assuming line in Tim Burton’s first Beetlejuice. (Maybe.) Photo: Parisa Taghizadeh/Warner Bros.

Warning: Spoilers ahead for Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice.

Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, Tim Burton’s sequel to his 1988 movie Beetlejuice, is weird. And of course it is. The first movie is what introduced Burton’s joyously macabre freakishness to mainstream audiences. If Beetlejuice Squared hadn’t included at least one character getting mauled by a shark in a Claymation sequence, I planned to ask for my money back. Thankfully, this was not necessary.

But there’s standard-issue, Tim Burton weirdness and then there’s “Wait, what the hell am I watching and why is Jenna Ortega pregnant all of a sudden?” weirdness. The concluding sequence of Beetlejuice Beetlejuice bursts into the movie like a drunken Goth melodrama that wandered in from some other Tim Burton project still in development.

At first, I was befuddled. I could not explain what I had just seen. I could tell you that the ending involved a trip to a castle, and a wedding, and a strange birthing scene. What any of that had to do with what occurred during the previous 90-plus minutes — including that whole Monica Bellucci storyline that went absolutely nowhere — was a mystery.

But then I went back and rewatched the original — it’s streaming on Max — and I actually understood what Burton was trying to accomplish. I’m still not sure if that ending works, but it’s more interesting than I initially gave him credit for, because of a question that Winona Ryder’s Lydia Deetz poses to Adam and Barbara Maitlin, the ghosts trying to haunt Lydia’s family out of the house they’ve just moved into, in Beetlejuice.

Lydia — a teen who possesses the ability to see ghosts, a power that the movie downplays like no YA Netflix series in 2024 would dare — has just met the Maitlins and is trying to wrap her mind around the fact that they’re actually dead specters of their former selves.

“What if this is a dream?” she asks them. “Can you guys do any tricks to prove I’m not dreaming?”

Adam and Barbara, played by Alec Baldwin and Geena Davis, shake their heads no.

I think that line stuck with Burton and screenwriters Alfred Gough and Miles Millar, and they applied it to the ending of the next chapter in Lydia’s story. Everything after the climactic scene in which the weddings of Lydia and Beetlejuice, as well as Lydia and her actual, manipulative fiancé, Rory (Justin Theroux), are thwarted, takes on a surreal, dreamlike quality. The sequence imagines a future where Lydia and Astrid (Ortega) have fully reconciled and are spending time together, first at Dracula’s castle, where Astrid spots a hot guy who may or may not be a vampire.

Immediately, the movie cuts from that moment to Astrid and Hot Vamp happily leaving their wedding ceremony while Lydia beams at them. How much time is supposed to have passed since the movie started, when Astrid was very much still in high school? Unclear.

Then shit gets extra bizarre when the setting shifts to an operating room where Astrid’s pushing out a child that turns out to be the creepy, bite-y, baby version of Beetlejuice that appears earlier in the film. If we take this scene literally, it is thoroughly confusing. Are we supposed to believe that Beetlejuice got Astrid pregnant, because: gross. If Astrid conceived this child with Hot Vampire Husband, then why would he look like Beetlejuice? The only language in which this scene makes sense is Dream Speak; it’s nonsensical because dreams are nonsensical.

Indeed, what happens next seems to confirm that this ending was a dream. In what has to be an homage to the finale of Newhart, Lydia wakes up gasping in bed and Beetlejuice, asleep beside her, asks her if she’s had a nightmare. Before there’s even time to take in the idea that maybe Lydia did marry Beetlejuice after all, Burton smash cuts to the sight of Lydia waking up a second time from a dream. This time she’s all by herself. And that’s the end of the movie. It elicits an: “Oh.” And then a: “What?”

The ending makes at least some version of sense if you think of it as Burton taking Lydia’s question in the first film — “What if this is a dream?” — and turning it into a thought experiment. It’s important to remember that Lydia and her mother, who she notes in Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is still alive, have been seemingly estranged since she was a teenager. Her desire to do better as a mom seems central to both the happy part of her dream and the nightmarish one. The wedding could represent the elation she hopes she’ll get to experience with Astrid someday, and the horrific birth of baby Beetlejuice could symbolize Lydia’s fears about having cursed her daughter to a life filled with ghoulish creatures, including, potentially, the ghost with the most.

But what if we take it a step further? What if that last moment, when Lydia wakes up alone, suggests that all of Beetlejuice Beetlejuice was just a dream and none of it was real? This is a fun idea to consider, especially if Burton plans to make a third Beetlejuice — you can’t actually say the title of that movie out loud — that pretends the second movie never happened. After years of being told by Marvel movies that every installment in a franchise is a building block to the next one, imagine Burton going, “That sequel I made? It was just a silly little blip that you don’t even need to try to remember.” How liberating that would be.

You could also argue that those final moments tell us that everything about the entire Beetlejuice experience was just a dream Lydia had as a teenager. What if Beetlejuice isn’t real, and neither are the Matlins, and the stories told in both movies, as well as the Broadway musical, were just the journal musings of a depressed teen with the combined fashion sense of Robert Smith and Bob Mackie?

What’s less entertaining and thought-provoking is succumbing to the conclusion that Burton and his fellow filmmakers got extremely high, wrote the ending of Beetlejuice Beetlejuice and insisted on keeping it as originally scripted. Because that, too, is a plausible explanation for the final few minutes of this film. I don’t like that one as much. I prefer the one where Tim Burton is still a few steps ahead of us intellectually, and still taking his weirdness to places the rest of us can barely comprehend.