A collective sigh (or in my case, an audible moan) echoed through the land of Stephen King fans when in May, True Detective Season One director Cary Fukunaga decided he wouldn’t be able to make the big screen adaptation of King’s It due to some last minute studio feet dragging on the budget. This was a huge bummer because the original TV miniseries, while it indeed gave us Tim Curry as evil clown Pennywise, definitely hasn’t aged well and is prime turf for a reboot. Fukunaga had convinced New Line Cinema to allow him to create two “R” rated movies that would encompass the entirety of the novel and had even started casting the films with young Will Poulter in line to play Pennywise. Alas…It was not meant to be.
But since the only thing bigger than superhero movies, Young Adult fiction series adaptations and remakes of animated classics into live action films is huge literary properties of which Stephen King is indeed king. In other words no way New Line was going to let this project rot in a sewer.
Thus today the rumor mill nearly popped a gasket when The Hollywood Reporter got the scoop that Andy Muschietti, director of the creepy but forgettable 2013 film Mama, is being heavily courted to make some version of It. So, what does this all mean? Nothing, really except the project apparently isn’t going away nor is it going to have the scripts or direction of Cary Fukunaga. While Muschietti may bring a nice level of eeriness to the film, no one aside from Muschietti and his family can be thrilled we’ll never see the Fukunaga vision.
