Current box office projections for IT have the film setting a new record for the biggest domestic opening weekend ever in September. Director Andrés Muschietti's big screen adaptation of Stephen King's novel of the same name has already set a fresh online trailer views record, thanks to the original IT teaser trailer garnering more than 197 million views within its first day of release. General interest in the movie has seemingly remained high since then, thanks in no small part to Warner Bros. Pictures using events such as San Diego Comic-Con to further drum up interest in the horror film.
IT is based on the first half of King's hefty source material (which spans more than a thousand pages) and revolves around a group of young outsiders growing up in the town of Derry, Maine, circa the 1980s - where they find themselves terrorized by an ancient, evil force that presents itself to them in the form of one Pennywise the Dancing Clown (Bill Skarsgård). Muschietti already has tentative plans to begin filming IT Part 2 next spring, assuming that the first installment is successful enough at the box office to warrant a followup. Based on the current projections, IT Part 1 will indeed be a sizable hit in its own right.
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Variety is reporting that IT is currently tracking to open with $50 million or more during its opening weekend at the U.S. box office in September. The current domestic opening weekend record for that month is $48 million, as was set by the animated sequel Hotel Transylvania 2 in 2015. Sources closer to WB are being more conservative with their own estimates and are predicting that IT will open in the $40 million range instead, in part because of the film's R-Rating. By comparison, Deadline is reporting that IT is tracking to open somewhere between $50-60 million.
IT will also have minimal competition during its opening frame, as neither of the other wide releases set to premiere against Muschietti's Stephen King movie (the Reese Witherspoon rom-com Home Again and dramatic thriller 9/11) are expected to make much of a dent at the U.S. box office. The film's R-Rating could indeed impact IT's ability to draw a crowd and result in a box office opening closer to that of this month's R-Rated, WB-distrubuted horror offering, Annabelle: Creation (which debuted with $35 million).For the time being, however box office trackers are claiming otherwise.
Likewise, news of IT's R-Rating seems to have been well-received in general by fans of King's source material, based on the idea that the rating allows the film to fully explore the adult themes of King's book and do justice by them. The promotional campaigns for R-Rated hits Deadpool and Logan similarly used those movie's ratings as selling points, promising a no-holds-barred take on their respective genres, befitting of their subject matter.All things considered, IT is poised to start the Fall 2017 Movie Season off on a strong foot when it comes to the box office, for those reasons.
