Stephen King's "It" Gets A Reboot

Warner Bros has hired director Jane Eyre director Cary Fukunaga to helm and co-adapt the decades-long story of the serial killer clown who lives in the sewers. Chase Palmer will co-write the script.

The Hollywood Reporter says (and these may be spoilers so be warned) that the story follows a group of kids called the Losers Club that encounter a creature called 'It' in the 1950s, which preys on children (movie one?). When the creature resurfaces in the 80s, the kids are called upon to regroup again, this time as adults (movie two?) even though they have no memory of the first battle.

The book was previously adapted in 1990 as an ABC miniseries that starred John Ritter, Harry Anderson, Tim Reid, Annette O'Toole, Richard Thomas and Tim Curry as Pennywise. Warners picked up the rights in 2009 and originally intended to adapt it into a single movie.

I hope they do a good job with this.  The original wasn't bad, but like any other King project, the ability to take the scary and put it into film is just hard to translate.  The best part of reading Stephen King is the naughty joy we get for hanging around inside the character's heads, the peek at them that doesn't shy away from the evil we all have inside of us.  That's hard to illustrate without hammy speeches and clumsy trips into the past for random side stories.

It was a hell of a story.  Each kid has his own interesting contribution to the story, and they all seemed to strike people differently.  The article makes a good point that the split between movies will likely be the first and second time It rears its head. How they grow up and why they are who they are is part of the story.  I hope making two separate movies will let them bring these kids to life and do it right.

And we have a creepy-ass clown.  That's a win-win in the horror world.