Plan accordingly. It has been revealed that ‘It: Chapter Two’ clocks in at a butt-numbing two hours and 45 minutes. Yes, that’s almost three hours! Nobody is going to sit through a three-hour movie! Psh! Warner Brothers and director Andy Muschietti must be insane!
If 2019 has proven anything, it’s that audiences aren’t daunted by long run times if they’re watching something they really want to see. And they are certainly going to want to see the continuation of the story begun in the highest-grossing horror movie of all time, ‘It: Chapter One’. ‘Chapter One’ was two hours and 15 minutes long, so combined this epic will span five hours. In contrast, the 1990 TV adaptation was three hours and 12 minutes long, minus commercial breaks. But the original Stephen King book is a monstrous 1,138 pages. No matter how long the movies are, they are still only adapting a portion of the story from King’s novel.
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Director Andy Muschietti decided to remix the original story, which jumps back and forth in time, from 1958 to 1985, focusing on the same group of friends as both young teens and adults. (The TV version left that structure intact.) Muschietti’s ‘Chapter One’ followed the Losers Club of Derry, Maine as teens. ‘Chapter Two’ will bring them back together as adults, but there will be flashbacks to their younger days.
Muschietti defended the length of ‘Chapter Two’. Speaking to Digital Spy, he said:
“A movie is very different when you’re writing the script and you’re building a story compared to what the final product is. At the beginning, when you’re writing and building the beats of the story, everything that you put in there seems very essential to the story. However, when you have the movie finally edited and it’s 4 hours long, you realize that some of the events and some of the beats can be easily lifted but the essence of the story remains intact. You cannot deliver a 4-hour movie because people will start to feel uncomfortable – no matter what they see – but we ended up having a movie that is 2 hours and 45 minutes, and the pacing is very good. Nobody who’s seen the movie has had any complaint.”
Believe it or not, Andy’s wife Barbara Muschietti, who acts as a producer, stated that an even longer cut is on its way!
“We will put out a director’s cut because this time it definitely merits it. We have some amazing scenes that didn’t make it into the movie. You have to make choices sometimes and some things cannot be in this theatrical release but are definitely worthy of people seeing them at a later date.”
As long as this extended version is on home video, audiences should have no trouble as they can hit pause whenever they need a pee break.
Bill Skarsgård returns as “It” a.k.a. Pennywise the Dancing Clown. Jessica Chastain stars as the adult Beverly Marsh, with Sophia Lillis as the teen version, plus: James McAvoy and Jaeden Martell as Bill Denbrough; Bill Hader and Finn Wolfhard as Richie Tozier, Andy Bean and Wyatt Oleff as Stanley Uris, James Ransone and Jack Dylan Grazer as Eddie Kaspbrak, Jay Ryan and Jeremy Ray Taylor as Ben Hanscom, Isaiah Mustafa and Chosen Jacobs as Mike Hanlon. ‘It: Chapter Two’ also features Jess Weixler, Will Beinbrink, and Teach Grant.
‘It: Chapter Two’ returns to terrorize audiences in theaters on September 6.
