Y'all know I'm Stephen King's biggest fanboy.

The 2017 film 'IT', based on King's 1986 novel of the same name, has some casting news for the second chapter:



Jessica Chastain is confirmed as Beverly Marsh.

James McAvoy is all but confirmed for Stuttering Bill Denborough (an inspired choice, in my opinion).

Bill Hader as Richie 'Trashmouth' Tozier. It just fits.

I think most will agree the 2017 'IT' was a brilliant adaption, particularly Bill Skarsgård's Pennywise, and the calibre of casting thus far shows they're looking to double down on a good story.

 

How is that cancer? The Hobbit was it done poorly, but giving a book room to breathe in the big screen is a good thing in many cases

 

So I didn't see IT in theaters. I watched it alone, in the evening, as one should to have a complete horror experience, right? Right.

I rightly have no idea if the movie was good or bad. I just know that it has renewed my conviction to just never watch horror films ever. For some unearthly reason I break this self-imposed rule once every few years and I always fucking turn into a jumpy mess and I'm scared to go to the bathroom after sundown for a week. Fuuuuuuuuuck this movie. If they wanted to scare people, well fucking done. I'm not even gonna watch the teaser for Chapter 2.

Fuck all horror films.

 

But It was a good film and I see no reason why the sequel well be bad. I'm glad it exists alongside The Tim Curry version. There's nothing wrong with franchises; we've had souless cash grabs for decades, and tossing a number after them hasn't changed that at all. Plenty of sequels or remakes are good after all

 

Yeah, a studio picture with big-name actors in it has to be a money-making exercise just because of how expensive it is. You don't sink $35 million into a production budget (Plus however much went into marketing) without a solid plan for how turn a profit on your investment.

For that matter, the Steven King miniseries from back in the day were money-making enterprises too. If anything they were more cynical, given that a lot of them were low-budget cash-ins on King's name at the height of his popularity as an author. Just slap his name on an in-name-only adaptation of one his novels or a screenplay he made vaguely approving noises about when you asked him about it while he was on a coke-binge and you can make bank no matter how terrible the mini-series is.

The only people who make movies purely for the art are youtubers whose channels are too small to make any real money. And even they're probably hoping to get their break and make it big someday.

 

Seriously? No one, not a soul in Hollywood sinks any kind of money into any kind of production without the end goal being to make even more money. People don't spend millions of dollars to give you a two hour entertainment experience for no reason other than the goodness from their hearts. Way to focus on the negatives whilst ignoring the positives. As if the Dark Knight was made in a little vacuum where they ignored the possibility of it making money. But seriously, of all the aspects of capitalism to bitch about...

I think that studios have most certainly been very lazy in some of their attempts to start franchises in the post MCU world. However, at the same time, when they haven't taken the time give proper care to the material then audiences take notice. And ultimately if you want a successful franchise then you need to deliver on each and every instalment. For the most part the best way to earn money, all things being equal, is to have a high quality product which shouldn't be viewed as an innately bad thing.

Just because someone makes a movie purely for the art doesn't inherently make it superior. Look at fanfiction for goodness sakes. It is the exact same thing in a different medium.

I enjoyed the first part of It, had an entire theatre to myself and loved it. So I'm looking forward to the final part. Like it or not the TV miniseries is pretty dorky, this is probably one of the few reboots that actually has a reason to exist.

 

People thought they wanted a faster horse instead of a car as well.

I'm happy we're getting more long form adaptations of books, because often trying to jam them into 90 minutes doesn't work

 

The new film was 137 minutes. It only covered the first half of the book and even then had the cut stuff. It was still a good film.

I'm not arguing for the sake of argument here, you're just being silly with the idea that having long stories take multiple films to do justice is somehow bad. There's nothing wrong with telling a story on 2hr vs telling it in 5hr split over two films if you're doing a better job with the latter. There tends to be something wrong with trying to squish a story into a small set of time or having a film run for three hours. A willingness to tell a story over multiple installments is something I didn't know I wanted for It but it's seemed to work out great; how you're getting "green screens" out of that I know not.

Also, hating the Dredd reboot really just goes to the argument that you have no taste, not that reboots are bad. Or hell, how they're somehow killing cinema.

 

Not to mention the It miniseries was split up into two parts as well. The book being half with kids and half with adults just makes for a natural dividing line, especially since the way King wrote the book (with the kid and adult plotlines running simultaneously) probably works way better on the page than it would on screen.

Speaking of the book, It was a 1138 page long long mega-tome. For comparison, that's a larger page count than all three Lord of the Rings books put together (1008 pages). The book has more than enough material to fill out two movies.

As for reboots killing other movies ... not seeing it. Reboots, remakes, and adaptations have been part of cinema for a long time without ruining anything. A quick check of the top-grossing movies of 2017 shows plenty of original films like Coco, Dunkirk, Get Out, The Greatest Showman, Split, and Wonder. For comparison I see only a few reboots in the top 25, and the Jumanji reboot was actually a very fresh take on the material (though the Beauty and the Beast remake ... yeah, it was justifiably bashed for creative sterility).

Really, the rise of internet word-of-mouth and social media makes it a lot rarer for good movies to go unnoticed, or for bad ones to get a pass. Movies like The Greatest Showman can bounce back from weak opening weekends to make bank, and big-name franchise films like Justice League or the Mummy reboot can still bomb even with all the marketing hype, especially since big budgets make it that much more of an uphill climb to actually start making money.