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2 months ago
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Beetlejuice Beetlejuice producer Tommy Harper has just helped Tim Burton return to the big screen with a bang after a five year absence, with the film grossing $264.3M worldwide in its first two weeks on release.
The seasoned producer – who is also a go-to for Tom Cruise, J.J. Abrams and Joseph Kosinski – is not resting on his laurels amid the congratulatory coverage.
After a whirlwind launch tour, which saw the film open Venice and then head to London for its UK premiere; followed by a quick trip to L.A. for Burton to receive a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, the pair are preparing to shoot the last two episodes of season 2 of Netflix hit show Wednesday.
“It’s been a very busy time,” says Harper. “We wanted to give all our attention to Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, to get it out into world, and then go to Dublin to finish up Wednesday. We’ll be shooting the last two episodes from October 2.”
The first season of the The Addams Family spin-off, starring Jenna Ortega as Wednesday Addams, remains one of Netflix’s most successful shows to date, nearly two years after its launch in November 2022.
It tops Netflix’s English-language TV show chart (last updated on September 15) in terms of its 252.1M views and comes in second behind the Stranger Things 4 for its 1.7B number of hours viewed.
Harper, who is an executive producer on the hit, created by Alfred Gough and Miles Millar, says the phenomenal success came as a surprise.
“We were very nervous when it came out. We had no clue it was going to be what it turned out to be,” he recounts. “It was like we went to make an independent film, and it became this huge blockbuster. We just made this TV show in Romania, kind of off the grid and then it became this global phenomenon.”
The producer contrasts this success with the fortunes of Lucasfilm’s Willow, a spin-off of Ron Howard’s 1988 fantasy adventure, which he also worked on, to give some perspective.
“It didn’t go to a second season, but I had a great time with it,” he says.
Harper suggests that Wednesday sparked Burton’s desire to revisit his 1988 cult classic Beetlejuice, with the show reigniting his creative drive after the bruising experience of working on Dumbo.
“Tim and I were in the middle of filming Wednesday in Romania,” says Harper, who accompanied Burton on the shoot, running from September 2021 to March 2022.
“We had some other projects circling, but then he just came to me one night after dinner and said, ‘I want to do Beetlejuice. It’s the one title that always gets asked when I’m making another one and I think, we have to do it now’,” he continues.
“Shooting Wednesday and getting inspired again about making stuff and having a great time on that show kind of gave him the momentum to get going on something.”
They discussed the idea in more depth over the weekend, and one week after the initial conversation, were talking to writers Seth Grahame-Smith as well as Gough and Millar (who co-wrote the screenplay) and pitching potential storylines.
“We kind of bashed out a story and an outline and three, four weeks later, I went to go pitch it to Warner Bros.,” says Harper.
It met with an enthusiastic response from Warner Bros. Motion Picture Groups’s then recently installed co-chairs Pamela Abdy and Mike De Luca, even if they have since revealed that getting the project over the line was not a given.
One of the key prerequisites for Burton was getting original cast members Michael Keaton, Winona Ryder and Catherine O’Hara back on board.
“Tim was very adamant that Michael had to sign on and that Catherine and Winona also had to be part of this. He was like, ‘If one of them doesn’t want to do it, or can’t see their path forward, then we don’t have a movie’,” recalls Harper.
The choice of Wednesday star Ortega for the role of Beetlejuice Beetlejuice character Astrid Deetz was obvious to both Burton and Harper but neither knew whether the actress would bite.
“We had the script, and we were basically getting Michael, Catherine and Winona on board,” recalls Harper. “I said to Tim, “We know who the perfect person for the daughter is’. He was like, ‘I know but do you think Jenna will be interested?”
“It was pretty much the weekend we were putting out the series. We had just had the premiere. He was in L.A., and had a meeting with Jenna. He handed her the script and said, ‘I know what my next project is, and if there’s something in here that you think you can tap into, I would love for you to be part of it’.”
“She was like totally freaked out. She’s a huge fan of Beetlejuice… She talks about driving home from Malibu and pulling over to read the script immediately. It all came together as the show was going out.”
Like the development phase, pre-production and the actual shoot of Beetlejuice Beetlejuice were speedy.
“We shot this movie in 48 days, when most big studio films are in the 70, 80-day range, on a budget way below $100 million,” says Harper.
“With Tim, the best approach is to work with a small art department on the concept art, creature design and costume design, staying small, to then explode out once you have designs. We prepped the movie in like 11 weeks, and then shot in 48 days, which is very fast.”
Harper reveals they toyed with the idea of filming in Romania on the back of their Wednesday experiences but ultimately chose in the UK, with some filming of exterior shots in Boston and Vermont.
This decision was based partly on the fact that space was available at the Warner Bros. Studios Leavesden, and the UK tax incentives.
“We talked about shooting it in Romania but then ended up pivoting to England,” says Harper. “Warners had stages open. And then we were like,’ You know what, let’s just go to England, because we’re also going to do post there’.”
“It was the right place to make the movie because we ended up building 77 sets and our creature department is also based there. Sometimes, it’s the little things in the movie, that are also hugely important, that tell you where to go. On did Top Gun: Maverick, we shot in L.A., because the jets were there.”
Harper and Burton, who have worked on and off together since an initial collaboration on Big Fish in 2003, have a number of other joint projects bubbling, notably, Burton’s remake of Attack Of The Fifty-Foot Woman.
“That’s something we’ve been developing with a writer for a while for which we’re supposed to get a script soon,” says the producer.
Harper says it is too early to take a decision on whether there will be a third Beetlejuice instalment although he does not rule it out.
“I think with Tim’s love for the title and the characters, the door is open, but we’ll see what happens next,” he says.
In the backdrop, there could also be potential future collaborations with Plan B, which was a producer on the Beetlejuice Beetlejuice.
“We were developing other stuff with them that didn’t get triggered, but had a great partnership with them, so we were like, ‘Come with us on this one’, although it was Tim and I, our companies, which ran point on the project,” says Harper, who says the other projects could still go forward.
Independent of Burton, Harper is also balancing a number of other development and production plates. He is executive producer on David Robert Mitchell’s sci-fi mystery thriller Flowervale Street – starring Anne Hathaway, Ewan McGregor and Maisy Stella – which wrapped shooting in June.
He is producing the Warner Bros-backed picture with J.J. Abrams and Hannah Minghella at Bad Robot – where he was Chief Operating Officer for a number of years from 2014, with Jackson Pictures’ Matt Jackson also on board.
“We’re in post-production right now… I’ve got a few other projects with Warner Brothers that haven’t been announced yet,” he says.
Warner Bros. has set a May 16, 2025 release date for the film. This has prompted suggestions it might me set for a world premiere at Cannes, which runs May 13 to 24 next year. Mitchell’s last film Under The Silver Lake played in competition there in 2018, and his breakout second film It Follows debuted in Cannes Critics’ Week.
Quizzed on the possibility, Harper says it’s not out of the question: “It’s a big theatrical film. It’s being released in the summer so it could go. It’s not an independent arts film but it’s very much David Robert Mitchell and his DNA.”
Beyond these collaborations, Harper is also attempting to develop his own projects from the ground up under his Tommy Harper Productions banner.
Among these is the recently announced series adaptation of Alice Feeney’s bestselling book Sometimes I Lie, in collaboration with writer-producer Matt Charman (Bridge of Spies, Treason). The psychological thriller revolves around about a woman who awakes from a coma in a seemingly vegetative state, with a a sense her husband no longer loves her, and tries to figure out how she got there.
The hot literary property was snapped up by Warner Bros TV in 2019, which optioned the rights on behalf of Ellen DeGeneres’ A Very Good Production, which was leading the development of a mini-series with Sarah Michelle Gellar in the lead role.
“It’s funny story, because I actually found the book and liked it when I was at Bad Robot but it got sold,” recounts Harper. “When the rights reverted back to her, the writer emailed me out of the blue after Wednesday and Top Gun: Maverick came out and said she’d really like to work with me and here we are.”
Harper’s ambition is to lead development more adaptation-based projects in this vein, around books that come up for option, or overlooked works he had read in the past.
“I read a lot of books from every country, not just the States. Any bookstore I’m in, in Ireland, in the UK or Australia, wherever I’m at, I’m always walking around trying to pick up novels that I really like. I’m kind of do it the old school way,” he says.
At the same time, Harper expects to continue working with the likes of Burton, Cruise, Abrams and Kosinski, and says he enjoys this mix.
“I have the best of what both worlds,” he says. “I’m independent and am able to bounce around. Sometimes I develop stuff from the ground up, like with Tim on this one [Beetlejuice Beetlejuice]. Sometimes there could be a script at a production company where they need a full-time producer, and they ask me to join. It’s a really great point where I’m at right now, and I’m happy.”
