Stephen King's IT reboot - Cary Fukunaga takes on Pennywise

Also, I think the period of time during which he wrote It also coincides with his “coked to the gills” period. But I may be mistaken.

The director and producer told Variety that they plan to bring the kids back for the sequel.

What’s the one thing you want to nail in the sequel that you weren’t able to do in this film?

Andy: The thing I want to bring in the next film that I couldn’t do here is the dialogue between the two timelines. That was so important in the book and we didn’t get to explore that here, but I wanted to keep the story of the kids as pure and without interference as I could. The dialogue between those two timelines with all those flashbacks is so important to the book that I want to bring that back.

Does that mean the kids will be back for the second movie or is it just them as adults?

Andy: We are going back to the summer of 1989 and if people love these characters and actors the way I do, it’s going to be a blast to go back to 1989 in the second one. I don’t want to go back just for that, I want to make those flashbacks essential in the plot where in order for the Losers to figure out the clues to defeat Pennywise, they have to retrieve their memories from the past.

Try The Dead Zone, one of King’s best endings.

Or Pet Sematary, which is still one of the scariest things I’ve ever read.

Between Pet and Salem’s Lot, these are the two most scariest for me too. I can’t stop thinking of both these books even after I finished them. Shining or The Stand (and even It) cannot compare on fear and disturbing level.

It grabbed me more than the others. This is because, crappy editing aside, the one thing King gets right more often than not is what it is like to be kids. My gang of friends could be the Losers, and were we hung out was similar to the Barrens.

King is really good at setting the scene and pace and making the character feels alive. That scene in It that I remember really well was the part where the kids lighted a fire with their fart. While I have not done it before, it is something I am not surprised if my friends were to do it. It’s such a believable scene.

I saw this last night. The theater was packed.

This movie was frustrating. For every thing the movie did right, they screwed up the main point of the movie.

I liked all the kid interaction stuff a lot. The young actors were quite good, and they really did a good job of conveying the bonds of friendship. Some of the scenes were appropriately creepy. The cinematography was quite nice.

I hated just about every “horror” scene. The jump-scare music. The herky-jerky run-at-you stuff. Everything was completely over the top and hollow. Unless you have serious coulrophobia, it just wasn’t scary. I was actually kind of annoyed by Pennywise at parts. It got to the point that I wanted to watch a movie about The Losers dealing with Bowers and the bullying and their crappy parents, but the stupid clown kept getting in the way.

Also, some of the changes were confounding. Why was all of Mike Hanlon’s research role given to the other kid? Why was Beth reduced to a damsel the boys had to rescue?

I know that the crowds that went to this movie got what they wanted. Jump scare Pennywise and Stranger Things mixed. A “safe” horror movie. Something for teens to watch with their friends. There’s nothing here that will stick with you or make you think about anything beyond the immediate experience.

This change bothers me quite a lot.

This pretty well nails my reaction–especially to the oversaturation of jump scares. I felt like it would have worked much better if they cut way back on that on focused on dread and being creepy.

And I think I’m done with nostalgia for the late-80’s at this point. I was bummed to learn they shifted the time period back.

What a weird film. Pennywise was about as scary as the shark attack on the Universal Studios Tram ride. There were just no stakes to this game. Not terrible is a pretty low bar to clear, but that certainly does not make this good or worth people’s time and money.

A man claiming to be a professional clown who planned to rally outside a New York City movie theater, complaining his business suffered because of marketing around the horror clown movie “It,” admitted Thursday the protest was a sham – a publicity stunt designed to promote the very movie he said cost him cash.

John Nelson conceded on WOR-710’s that he had been hired, though he wouldn’t say who had paid him. Neither New Line Cinema, the studio behind the film, nor its parent company, Warner Brothers, has returned calls for comment.
[…]
“You’ve exposed me,” he said. “Look, this is gonna get me in a little bit of trouble. We were hired to do this for promotional purposes.”

He refused to disclose who hired him and hurried off the phone, saying, “We’ll be there later today,” promising the so-called clown rally would still go on at the theater.

Surely people get the joke - clown rally… that’s pretty obvious, isn’t it?

We just watched this one. I wonder if some of the people here saw the same bloody movie I did because we thought it was excellent. I do not care for horror movies. Most of them are nothing but torture porn (I am looking at you, Saw series) with no redeeming value whatsoever. I truly detest the genre but as a lover of the book and with such great reviews I decided that it was worth giving it a shot.

The theater was surprisingly quite packed for a 1 PM Sunday showing, especially for a movie in its third weekend. They are estimating $30m for this weekend and if what I saw was any indication it will beat those numbers. Of course the first weekend here was a hurricane and the 2nd was cleanup so maybe this is not indicative of other areas of the country. But I digress…

This had its share of jump scares and such but it was more creepy than anything. It was one part horror movie and one part Stand By Me, which captures the feel of the book quite well. Condensing 500 pages (half of IT) into a 2 hour movie means a lot got cut but this did the source material justice. Changes to the source material seemed reasonable and most of the truly memorable scenes like the blood in the sink, Georgie and Neibolt Street made it in. Some things are not really changes like Ben Hanscom’s being the researcher of the bunch. In the book Ben is always in the library and it makes sense for him to be the historian in a movie. In the book Mike Hanlon did not fill that role until the rest of the Losers left town and became adults.

The kids were utterly fantastic. If they were not believable then the whole movie would fall apart but they all nailed their spots even while a couple had very little to work with. Sophia Lillis should have a great career ahead of her. She did wonders being both the most vulnerable and the strongest of the group. Bill Skarsgard had huge shoes to fill as Pennywise but did really well being sufficiently spooky. I like how they cut frames when showing him to make him seem unreal.

The kids’ tale was always more compelling than the adults in the book. If you think about the book, the adults show up to town, have a couple of minor run-ins with Pennywise, have some bad Chinese food, get attacked by Bowers, go into the sewers and…well, I will not spoil the ending. Needless to say it is a lot less interesting than the tale when they were kids. I think perhaps that is why they saved the real history for Part 2. It will make it more interesting for the adults to recite their historical findings as flashbacks to when they were kids than it would be to focus a 2 hour movie totally on the less-interesting adults, their adult problems and the baggage they bring back to Derry.

I think It comes down to this. If you are looking for a horror movie you should look elsewhere. If you are looking for an IT movie this is excellent.

Heh, as a horror fan who hated everything about this movie except for the first scene between Pennywise and Georgie, I couldn’t agree with this statement more! :)

-Tom

It’s excellent because it’s Stand By Me, complete with Ace, but it also includes a killer klown.

I really liked it, too.

I enjoyed the movie a lot when I finally saw it. I would say that the Georgie/Pennywise scene was pitch perfect (except for Georgie’s weird laughing and Pennywise staring), but after that Pennywise became a presence and lost his character. Bev was a breath of fresh air until, no fault of the actress, she was abducted.

It did take my third viewing to realize this is a PG13 movie with a bunch of cussing, thus the R. None of Pennywise’s scares or kills really merited the R rating.

Despite this I thoroughly enjoyed it for what it is, but I’m really worried about Chapter 2.

My biggest red flags for the next movie are as follows:

1. Is Henry Bowers alive?

In movie language, he’s dead. He was thrown down a seemingly endless well, hitting the stones multiple times as he was pitched into the darkness. We never see him again.

Without Henry, we don’t have the physical presence (other than Tom Rogan) to capture the adults, to almost kill Mike, and break Eddie’s arm. Pennywise’s greatest asset again the adults is gone, unless they shift it all to Tom.

2. Did Beverly kill Alvin Marsh?

It took me watching it three times before I heard his grunts in both scenes after being hit, but it took me listening for them. Hell, he was bleeding from his head when Bill found him and the message, presumably written in his blood, on the walls.

Without Alvin being alive, Bev has no reason to ring the doorbell that leads to the Mrs. Kersh sequence, one of the best of the adult storyline.

We never get a real answer for this. We just know she’s moving to live with her Aunt in Seattle.

3. Are Victor Criss and Belch Huggins still alive?

Henry’s cronies are last scene hanging out next to the Trans Am when Bowers finds the knife. We see him kill his dad, but then they just disappear from the film. In movie language, they’re alive.

  1. The Script

. . . The script they used for this was based heavily on Cary Fukunaga’s last script. There are some small changes, but a lot of the scenes, dialogue, and interactions are the same. Some I saw was Mike was more prevalent in Cary’s story and the “Mama” style painting was actually a nude Judith with a sword.

There were comments about how they didn’t like the Ritual of Chüd and the Macroverse stuff. They’ve already announced that the research will default back to Mike. Mike will be the librarian, but he will be a junkie that uses drugs to learn about the Ritual of Chüd. In the original book, they had an underground play area that they smoked out using a fire to try and have a vision. Both Mike and Richie are the ones to see it.

My point is that the original writers that made this such a strong adaptation are no longer going to be involved in the project. So we’re going to get a new crop that’s going to be bigger, badder, and more badass than the first film, without the restraint that made this film so smart, if a watered down horror film.

  1. Do we really need the kids?

Yes, the kids are the best part of the book. They are the best part of the 1990 miniseries. And they are the best part of this movie.

However, for us IT book readers, they’ve already hit almost every milestone in the book. What made this movie so much stronger as an IT adaptation is that they ignored the adults. They didn’t undercut the tension of the childhood by introducing the adult cast and using flashbacks. It was all immediate.

And, for run time, we’re already at over 2/3rds of the original runtime without the adults. As much as I enjoyed them, shouldn’t we have the same immediacy for the adults’ storyline to actually make it interesting and not undercut them with the kids’ charisma?


I don’t know. I got really steeped in the book while preparing my video for the movie, then seeing it multiple times, it had a lot of unresolved threads that leave me questioning the story for the next book.

  1. Did you see a dead body? No? Then in movies that means there’s always a chance! In this case I think it’s almost certain he is back for round two.

  2. I believe so. As an aside, the girl hat played Bev is easily the best actor/actress of this movie. She did an incredible job.

  3. I do not think it matters.

  4. We will see. With the tone already set there is a good chance that a competent writer can pick this up and run with it.

  5. We will see them again. Notice they left Pennywise’s background and history undiscovered in this move. The adults are the weaker emotional group but there is so much history to explore that I think the 2nd could be an even better movie than the first. Things like the Iron Works, the shootout and the Black Spot fire could all lend weight to the 2nd movie without having the Stand By Me kids being front and center.

I felt it did very well as a tonally accurate King novel to film adaptation. As a pure horror film, not so much, but this captured the written King better than any movie I’ve yet seen. (I don’t really count Shawshank and Stand By Me, as they aren’t horror.)

Also, holy jesus there are a lot of Stephen King movies?? The guy must be wildly rich beyond imagination:

http://stephenking.com/library/movie/

I count 45. FORTY FRICKIN’ FIVE KING MOVIES. Holy shit ya’ll

Just sat down to watch this. I’m only just started but the beginning couldn’t have been more of a misfire. Also, I forgot there was a Stranger Things alum in this.

But nice usage of The Cult in the soundtrack.