Tim Burton Just Revealed Why He Didn't Bring Alec Baldwin And Geena Davis Back For "Beetlejuice Beetlejuice"

Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is a hit...at least according to the early reviews out of the Venice Film Festival this week.

Director Tim Burton's sequel to his 1988 classic horror comedy premiered at the festival on Wednesday and will be released in theaters nationwide on Sept. 6.

While stars of the original film Michael Keaton , Winona Ryder , and Catherine O'Hara are all back, Alec Baldwin and Geena Davis are not, and Burton recently opened up about why.

Sonia Moskowitz / Getty Images, Tommaso Boddi/Variety via Getty Images

In the original film, Baldwin and Davis play a deceased couple haunting their old home only to become annoyed when a new family moves in.

O'Hara and Jeffrey Jones played married couple Delia and Charles Deetz, while Winona Ryder played Charles's daughter Lydia. Jones also did not return for the sequel.

Of course, Keaton played Betelgeuse, the spirit Baldwin and Davis's characters summon to scare away the Deetz family.

The sequel chronicles Delia and Lydia's return to Winter River following a tragedy. They're accompanied by two new characters: Lydia's daughter Astrid ( Jenna Ortega ) and Lydia's fiancé Rory (Justin Theroux).

Burton revealed that Baldwin and Davis's characters didn't return as the sequel focuses on the three generations of Deetz women.

"I think the thing was for me I didn't want to just tick any boxes," he told People . "So even though they were such an amazing integral part of the first one, I was focusing on something else."

"A sequel like this, it really had to do with the time," he also said. "That was my hook into it, the three generations of mother, daughter, granddaughter. And that [would] be the nucleus of it. I couldn't have made this personally back in 1989 or whatever."

In addition to Ortega and Theroux, the sequel sees Monica Bellucci joining the cast as Betelgeuse's ex-wife, Delores...

...and Willem Dafoe as the ghost detective Wolf Jackson.

In April, Davis told Entertainment Tonight she wasn't returning for the sequel, saying, "Oh, you were expecting that I would be? Yeah, no, you know what? Because my theory is that ghosts don't age. Not that I have. Our characters were stuck the way they looked when they died forever, so it's been a while. It's been a minute."