IT CHAPTER TWO Was Almost Two Films

One common complaint from critics in regards to It Chapter Two is the lengthy runtime packed into the final bout with Pennywise. The film covers a lot of ground as the evil clown makes his return to Derry but it almost split things up to offer up more content in the form of not only a second movie but also a third, according to the team behind the movie.

“We flirted with making two more films,” producer Barbara Muschietti told io9. “Then it was decided that we would only make one film but clearly there was a lot of material that Andy and our writers had to adapt.”

The source material from Stephen King serves its story with more than 900 pages of content about what happened to the kids of Derry when they grew up. It Chapter Two director Andy Muschietti and his writer Gary Dauberman took on the task of doing as much of that content big screen justice as possible.

“There’s a lot of It that’s a lot of writing,” Muschietti said. “The challenge was to wrap this huge work and translate it into film language. So the story is leaner. It’s tighter. We turn the screws of tension to keep the audience on the edge of their seat all the time. And everything is more consequential. In the book, it’s just looser.” Still, he did manage to sneak a few direct moments into the film and pay a worthy homage to the story’s ending.

Some of the requests for specific moments from King’s original story came from King himself. “He gave us a little list of things that he would like to see in the movie,” the director explained. “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.”

Of course, there are some deviations from the source material with this conclusion, such as the Standpipe rolling down the hill during the destruction of Derry from the latter pages of the novel. King wanted to see the moment realized on screen but Muschietti and Dauberman had to go another route. “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 added. “So we had to pass on that.”

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It Chapter Two is now playing in theaters.