IT CHAPTER TWO Director Reveals What Scenes Stephen King Requested for the Movie

Author Stephen King doesn’t often get involved with adaptations of his stories, but it seems that the attention earned by the 2017 IT resulted in King taking a more active interest in IT CHAPTER TWO, going so far as to request the inclusion of specific scenes. Director Andy Muschietti knew he couldn’t make a literal adaptation of the 1,100-page source material, as not everything would be as effective in a movie, but King shared his support for two specific scenes that he wrote which he had hoped to see brought to life. Ultimately, Muschietti didn’t follow all of King’s wishes for the sequel.

WARNING: Mild spoilers below for IT CHAPTER TWO

While King was certainly in a position to make demands for the film, Muschietti noted that the author was quite mild-mannered with his requests.

“He gave us a little list of things that he would like to see in the movie,” Andy Muschietti shared with io9. “But he is very gentle. He said like, ‘Please take this. It is what it is. There are no strings attached.’ It was more an affectionate thing with what he remembers of his own work.”

One of the scenes he requested was an attack on Richie from a Paul Bunyan statue, which the 1990 miniseries adaptation didn’t include. The production value and CG effects allowed the sequence in IT CHAPTER TWO to be effectively, and frighteningly, brought to life.

A request that Muschietti didn’t depict, however, is the ending of the novel, which sees the town of Derry, Maine destroyed in the wake of the Losers’ Club’s conflict with the entity that has been plaguing the town.

“We didn’t go, at all, in that direction because I wanted to keep the ending more intimate and more about the emotions of the humans of this group,” Muschietti admitted. “So we had to pass on that.”

In IT CHAPTER TWO, 27 years after the Losers’ Club defeated Pennywise, he has returned to terrorize the town of Derry once more. Now adults, the Losers have long since gone their separate ways. However, kids are disappearing again, so Mike, the only one of the group to remain in their hometown, calls the others home. Damaged by the experiences of their past, they must each conquer their deepest fears to destroy Pennywise once and for all…putting them directly in the path of the clown that has become deadlier than ever.

IT CHAPTER TWO lands in theaters on Friday.

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