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The post-Labor Day weekend, which is a 2024 sizzler with BEETLEJUICE BEETLEJUICE, was really on fire when IT opened Sept. 8, 2017 to $123.4M.

The R rated supernatural thriller from New Line Cinema cost $35M to produce and did $704.2M worldwide. Directed by Andy Muschietti (MAMA) and produced by Dan Lin, Roy Lee & Doug Davison, it starred Jack Dylan Grazer & Bill Skarsgård. IT was written by Chase Palmer, Cary Fukunaga and Gary Dauberman as the first part of a two part adaptation of the Stephen King bestseller published in September 1986. IT CHAPTER TWO, also directed for New Line by Muschietti, opened Sept. 6, 2019 and grossed $473.1M worldwide on a budget of $79M.

Given the franchise’s phenomenal success, IT’s twisted road to the screen during seven years of development hell is all the more compelling. The project started out in March 2009 as a Warner Bros. film to be written & directed by screenwriter David Kajganich (BLOOD CREEK). At the time, WB wanted to adapt King’s book as one movie. That left Kajganich struggling with how to turn an 1,138 page novel with a large population of characters into a 120 page screenplay.

In June 2010, Kajganich was writing a draft that would be R rated as stipulated by WB. By early June 2012, Cary Fukunaga (NO TIME TO DIE) was directing and co-writing with Chase Palmer. In May 2014, WB transferred IT to its New Line division. That December, Dan Lin revealed IT would now focus on just the first half of King’s book where seven outcast youngsters in King’s Losers Club are terrorized by the killer clown Pennywise. How the kids come up against Pennywise as grown-ups in the novel’s second half would now be the sequel’s storyline.

Principal photography, per Lin, would start in the summer of 2016. It did — in Toronto from June 27-Sept. 21 — but not with Fukunaga directing and not with Fukunaga & Palmer’s screenplay.

Late May 2015 saw Fukunaga depart after creative conflicts with New Line. “I was trying to make an unconventional horror film,” he explained. “It didn’t fit into the algorithm of what they knew they could spend and make money back on based on not offending their standard genre audience.” There were reports that Fukunaga’s IT would have gotten an NC-17 rating that would have drastically limited New Line’s ability to market and release the movie.

Muschietti succeeded Fukunaga in June 2015 and recommended that New Line use much of the Fukunaga/Palmer script, but also add to it some powerful material from King’s novel that by now had become well known. Muschietti’s rewrite later saw some rewriting by horror meister Gary Dauberman, whose credits included the 2014 hit ANNABELLE.