Despite all of the bloodletting, IT had a triumphant ending. Against all odds, The Losers’ Club cast the dancing demon clown into the hellacious pit from whence it came. The motley crew stood tall, knowing they had won a great victory over the child-eating beast.
Then the credits rolled, slamming the real title of the movie on screen: IT: Chapter One. None of the Losers may know it, but this party is just getting started. After banking over $117 million in a single weekend, you can bet Warner Bros. is going to keep this monster bash going all the way through 2019 when IT: Chapter Two is expected to arrive in theaters. Though the studio kept mum on the real title of the film (and didn’t even mention the post-credits tease), it’s pretty clear Warner Bros. was irrepressibly confident in director Andy Muschietti’s final product long before it debuted.
Though IT may take place in a zany, intra-dimensional universe that only Stephen King could dream up, Muschietti and his producers have plenty of story left to tell. Considering the “IT” novel spanned over 1,000 pages, the filmmakers have a built-in bank of source material to draw from the second, unadapted half of Stephen King’s legendary novel. While much of IT is already well established (thanks to the Tim Curry-led 1990 miniseries), the end of the horror adventure remains a secret to most audiences. If adapted with the same fealty and imagination as the latest movie, Chapter 2 will be a particularly horrifying and grotesque affair.
Though the sequel script is still in progress, co-writer Gary Dauberman is apparently hard at work on getting Chapter 2 off the ground. As producers Seth Grahame-Smith and David Katzenberg told Slashfilm:
We are locked and loaded and ready to jump in the minute they say ‘go.’ The script is not done, but the script is being worked on. Obviously, all of the filmmakers are chomping at the bit to get started, and we have a very exciting shape, and Gary’s working away.
According to Variety, Muschietti expects the script to be completed in January of next year before starting pre production in early spring of 2018.
What We Know About Chapter Two
The primordial beast that presents itself as Pennywise the Dancing Clown appears in Derry, Maine every 27 years. The demon may have taken a beating at the end of the movie, but it’s far from dead. IT's simply taking its ritualistic, two-and-a-half-decade long nap before rising through the belly of the earth and returning to feast on the tasty northeastern town it loves so dearly.
Before going their own separate ways, however, The Losers agreed to return home 27 years later should Pennywise attempt to destroy another generation of children. In IT: Chapter 2, The Losers will be tax-paying, gainfully employed adults living in the year 2016. Given the degree to which IT savaged the box office (also giving Hollywood a second lease on life after an otherwise abysmal year), Andy Muschietti will have his pick of the lot for adult actors who could play the grown-up versions of the seven adolescents. Considering the number of casting wishlists that popped up weeks before IT premiered, expect to hear updates on the Chapter Two adult cast every week for the next year.
Though the grown-up Losers will likely dominate the sequel, you can also expect the young stars to return in some shape or form. As Andy Muschietti told Collider,
“[Chapter Two is] very connected to the first…there will be that dialogue between the two timelines that we didn’t have in the first one because the first one is all about the kids.”
Muschietti went so far as to tell Variety that the sequel would feature plenty of flashbacks to 1989. We also know from Stephen King’s novel that some of The Losers' Club members actually had their minds wiped from the trauma of their youth. This leaves them at a disadvantage to remembering how they first fought the dancing clown.
The cause of that particular amnesia is supernatural in nature, and Muschietti seems keen to dive into the cosmic background that colors the IT universe (and perhaps feature Maturin the Turtle). As he told Yahoo Movies,
“Getting in to that other dimension - the other side - was something that we could introduce in the second part…I also wanted to leave something for the second half, so I didn’t want to get in trouble with that - going into the Macroverse or that transdimensional stuff. There’s another movie to expand into that.”
Muschietti implied that budgetary limitations may have confined the first IT solely to Derry, but now that the movie made back its budget several times over, expect a blank check for IT: Chapter Two and a huge rollout for its expected premiere in 2019.
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While anticipation for IT and its sequel were already high, the intense and unexpected box office results mean that might more scrutiny will be paid to the development of Chapter 2. Are there any actors on your wish list for Chapter 2 or any specific plot points you want to see realized on the big screen? Let us hear about it in the comments!