Streamin’ King: The New ‘IT’ Is The Highest Grossing Horror Film Of All-Time

Welcome to Streamin’ King, a series grave-digging through the myriad Stephen King adaptations available on your favorite streaming services. This time we’re watching 2017’s It, the first big-screen adaptation of King’s 1986 novel. Spoiler-light until noted otherwise.

THE GIST: Firstly, 1990’s perhaps overly revered ABC miniseries It starred Tim Curry as a shapeshifter who goes by Pennywise (“The Dancing,” sometimes) Clown. (S)he periodically awakens to haunt the entire town of Derry, Maine, feasting on its children while manifesting as their greatest fears, and enjoying a convenient blindness from the adults.

Then, 27 years later IRL—also the length the creature, It, hibernates after ODing on kid-corpses—the regular non-TV movie finally came to the big screen. This iteration’s intolerably endless slog to reality dates back to at least early 2009, when David Kajganich was hired to write a script. Eight damn years. For one of the best novels of King’s (and the horror genre’s) lifetime.

The real twist ending is the words “Chapter One” appearing at the end credits before the public was aware if the sequel’s fate had been decided. The two-parter will conclude Sept. 6, 2019; that one’ll follow the Losers’ Club as adults. (But the kids are back, too.)

PEDIGREE: Directed by Argentina’s Andrés “Andy” Muschietti (Mama), produced by sister Barbara Muschietti. Debut from screenwriter Chase Palmer, who tuned up an original draft by Cara Fukunaga (True Detective) and Gary Dauberman (Annabelle). Deeply unsettling cinematography by Chung-hoon Chung (Park Chan-wook’s Oldboy, Thirst).

Stars Sweden’s Bill Skarsgård (Hemlock Grove, Allegiant) as Pennywise. The Losers’ Club is Jaeden Lieberher (Masters of Sex, St. Vincent), Finn Wolfhard (Stranger Things), Sophia Lillis (the upcoming Sharp Objects, as young Amy Adams, which would be hilarious if they did in reverse for Adult Bev Marsh), Jeremy Ray Taylor, Chosen Jacobs, Jack Dylan Grazer, and Wyatt Oleff.

WORTH WATCHING FOR CONSTANT READERS? Absolutely and crucially, unless you’ve chosen to avoid all It adaptations until you reach the clearing at the end of the path. The new It‘s incredible as a film and captures King so spectacularly it’s almost unbelievable we ever got it. The vast majority of King adaptations are bad; many are trash, some are good, a few are great. It is at the tippy-top.

WORTH WATCHING FOR KING NEWBIES/AGNOSTICS? If you like horror, you skipped this question already. If you like movies, period, and haven’t indulged, please do. If you have a low terror threshold, you’re in trouble though.

20 STEPHEN KING TIES, REFERENCES, AND MISCELLANY:

1. Why is Bill’s dad exactly Steven Weber circa the 1997 Shining miniseries?

2. If you’re just really into It and haven’t read much/any King, you can find more kids/coming of age/Losers’ Club-y stuff in “The Body” (a.k.a. Stand By Me), “Mile 81,” Joyland, and Hearts in Atlantis, for starters.
3. Discarded from the Fukunaga/Dauberman script were canon events like the Black Spot fire, the 1879 Silver Dollar Saloon Massacre. The final version, though, wisely reinstated things like the exact names from the book, Butch Bowers’ unbelievably unsettling end, and the leper. Fortunately that Bev scene didn’t make it.
4. The Muschiettis’ first movie was called Mama; one iconic King short story is named “Gramma.” #generations
5. The Muschiettis went to King’s hometown of Bangor, Maine in pre-production. This pic was real exciting, as were the many snapshots the siblings shared throughout production. They may legally be aunts and uncles to all those kids by now.

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Bangor, Maine

A post shared by Andy Muschietti (@andy_muschietti) on Jan 16, 2016 at 9:41am PST

6. Derry’s a fictional Bangor surrogate that has featured in King’s work more than 20 times. Its twin fictional town is Castle Rock (Needful Things, this year’s Gwendy’s Button Box).
7. King’s novel has its two timelines—kids’ story, adults’ story—running parallel. “On the second movie,” A. Muschietti told EW, “that dialogue between timelines will be more present. If we’re telling the story of adults, we are going to have flashbacks that take us back to the ‘80s and inform the story in the present day.” B. Muschietti says the kids are “an important component.” Also, Mike will be “a librarian junkie” and “a wreck” from being “the one pivotal character that brings them all together, but staying in Derry took a toll with him.” (King junkies of yore: The Stand‘s Larry Underwood, The Dark Tower‘s Eddie Dean, Revival‘s Jamie Morton.)

8. King’s famous motivation for writing It, as restated to Time in 2009: “I thought to myself, ‘Why don’t you write a final exam on horror, and put in all the monsters that everyone was afraid of as a kid? Put in Frankenstein, the werewolf, the vampire, the mummy, the giant creatures that ate up New York in the old B movies. Put ’em all in there.'”
9. When Cary Fukunaga left It after three years on board as director and co-writer, King seemed desolate. Fukunaga told Variety, “They wanted me to make a much more inoffensive, conventional script. But I don’t think you can do proper Stephen King and make it inoffensive.”

10. Adorably, six months before It even came out, King’s assistant of many years, Marsha DeFilippo, posted on his official message board (she’s “Ms. Mod”): “Steve asked me to pass along that he saw a screening of IT today and wanted to let everybody know that they should stop worrying about it as the producers have done a wonderful job with the production.” Then this:

11. It has climbed to $698 million at the box office; at $442 million it became the highest-grossing horror movie of all time. Before It, the most successful King film was 1999’s The Green Mile, which made $287 million globally.
12. It was the lynchpin for a King-renaissance year that also included Mr. Mercedes and The Mist on TV, Gerald’s Game and 1922 Netflix films, The Dark Tower in theaters, the collaborative books Sleeping Beauties and Gwendy’s Button Box, and the Pulitzer-winning column Streamin’ King.
13. The Dark Tower, which hit a month before It, had a setpiece at an abandoned carnival in the woods; a great Pennywise sign looms.

14. Finn Wolfhard is, obviously, also the star of Stranger Things, which began a year before It hit. What makes it particularly mindfuckish is the fact that Things is so heavily influenced by ’80s King, and It literally is ’80s King. Instant Constant Reader clout for lil Finn. (Also he jumps into a quarry in both, but Things-Finn gets suspended mid-air by his superhero friend, which It would never.)
15. The Muschiettis are now making Locke & Key for Hulu, based on the stunning graphic novel series by King’s author son Joe Hill. It concerns New England children and the supernatural and is thematically a bit in line with It. Which is good for Joe, because…

16. Henry Bowers is played by Nicholas Hamilton, who was also in The Dark Tower.
17. Bill Skarsgård will be in Hulu’s Castle Rock anthology series coming up, as will Sissy “Carrie White” Spacek, Terry O’Quinn (King credit: Silver Bullet), and Melanie Lynskey (Rose Red).

18. Oh and btw, the It miniseries was co-written by the guy who wrote the first King movie, Carrie. Lawrence D. Cohen has just nine IMDb writing credits; five are King-based, The Tommyknockers miniseries being one.
19. Even if your awareness of Carrie is nearly nonexistent, Bev’s bloody bathroom scene kind has to remind you of Carrie.
20. Also: if what happens to this standpipe in the novel happens in the second movie…good god.

CRITICAL CONSENSUS: 85 percent fresh on Rotten “Our Last Jedi Score Got Hacked by the Alt-Right” Tomatoes and 70 on Metacritic, which always seems to be like 10+ points lower than you’d think, right?

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL CONTEXT FOR It (1986): Second-longest King novel after 1990’s uncut Stand, closely tailed by Under the Dome, The Dark Tower VII, and 11/22/63. Preceded by Thinner and The Talisman, succeeded by four novels in 14 months. Cocaine’s a helluva drug. (Literally, not a joke. Those books were written by the unprecedented mixture that was coke, booze, and King’s relentless brain and word processor discipline.) Two of those 1987 follow-ups were the intensely druggy Misery and The Tommyknockers.

NEXT TIME ON STREAMIN’ KING: 1987’s The Running Man, an anomaly both for being a Richard Bachman work and taking a slew of liberties with the ’82 novel.

Zach Dionne is a Mainer and he can tell you for sure that Derry in It looks and feels so much like all his favorite small towns.

Purchase It anywhere you buy VOD movies. The Blu-ray hits Jan. 9.

Where to stream It (2017)