welcome to celeb scene Central Charles Deets the patriarch of the Deets family and a key character from the original Beetlejuice is gone in the sequel but definitely not forgotten director Tim Burton made it common knowledge that Charles would not be alive during the events of the sequel Beetlejuice Beetlejuice he would especially not be played by Jeffrey Jones who retreated from the public I after his initial arrest in 2002 for possession of child pornography and registering as a sex offender after pleading no contest to soliciting a 14-year-old boy to pose for sexually explicit photos but the film playing now in theaters still has a place for the character screenwriter Alfred Goff who penned the screenplay with longtime writing partner Miles Miller tells Entertainment Weekly that Charles's fate in the film was actually inspired by Burton's worst nightmare the whole premise of Beetlejuice Beetlejuice stems from Charles's death which prompts his wife deia Katherine O'Hara his daughter Lydia Winona Ryder and his teenage granddaughter Astrid Jenna Ortega to return to the fictional town of winter River con where the ghostly Shenanigans All Began dilia is the one who must tell her stepdaughter how he died and the audience sees it all dramatized in a stop motion animated sequence Charles was in a plane crash and just when he thought he survived a shark arrived to bite him in half a standin portrays the ghost of a half-eaten now headless Charles brought to life with practical makeup and costume effects in the new scenes set in the afterlife the voice was added in during post-production and no actor credit is listed for Charles the way Charles dies in that animated piece is Tim's nightmare of dying he literally pitched that my nightmare is I'm in a plane crash I survive the plane crash I almost drown and then a shark eats me Goff tells ew we were like well that's genius so that's going to be how he dies according to gof who worked with Burton and Miller on Netflix's Wednesday series the filmmaker wanted Beetlejuice Beetlejuice to focus on the three characters of Lydia dilia and Beetlejuice Michael Katon Charles dying was the Imp is for doing it the Scribe says then what happens when Charles dies he adds because as you know when you have these moments of family crisis I think everybody likes to believe a family gets stronger a family doesn't whatever Fishers are in your family in a way get magnified so it was just the idea of having these three generations of women Under One Roof in this very intense situation and how they're dealing with it and the forces that come with that gof also spoke with ew about his discussions with Burton and Miller about whether to include the maand Adam Alec Baldwin and Barbara Gina Davis in the new movie there was a version of the script where they just showed up at the end but the problem is they ghosts so they kind of needed to look like they were 35 which was never going to happen he said I think Tim felt and miles and I agreed that their story had been told so how do we move on from that