By It is one of my favorite Stephen King books, to the point where I wind up re-reading it every year, and every year I thoroughly enjoy it until the adolescent gangbang at the end. Seriously. If you don’t remember that, you probably are more familiar with the TV miniseries version starring Tim Curry as Pennywise the Clown and Crushing Boredom as Every Other Scene. While nothing can replace Tim Curry’s performance as the horrible clown that haunts your nightmares, Cary Fukunaga, director of last year’s adaptation of Jane Eyre, has signed on to direct the film and, with the help of screenwriter Chase Palmer, split the notoriously-chunky book into two films. I’m not 100% sure how that would work, honestly. The easy solution is to take the novel’s structure, which flashes back and forth between 1955 and 1985 as a group of kids try to fight Pennywise and as they fight him again as adults, and just do the easy split with one movie set in 1955 and one movie 1985 or whatever years they choose in order to modernize it.
That said, such a binary split would ruin a lot of the fun of the book, seeing how events in the past directly correlate to events in the present over the course of a few hundred pages. There’s plenty that can be excised from the book, including all the various subplots about the town’s evil history and the subplot featuring the three bullies, and oh yeah, the part where the lead kids gangbang another kid. Seriously, Stephen King had some messed up things he was processing while writing this one.
[Via THR]