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As you know, Cary Fukunaga (True Detective) had been developing Stephen King’s IT for the big screen for years, and he recently ended up leaving the project. The studio and director came to a point where they started having creative differences and Fukunga decided to leave the project, which is a shame. I really was looking forward to seeing his vision, but apparently it was just too awesome, unconventional, and hardcore for the studio to handle.
During an interview with Variety, the director opened up about his version of the film and why things didn’t work out, saying that they thought his version was too offensive:
“I was trying to make an unconventional horror film. 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. Our budget was perfectly fine. We were always hovering at the $32 million mark, which was their budget. It was the creative that we were really battling. It was two movies. They didn’t care about that. In the first movie, what I was trying to do was an elevated horror film with actual characters. They didn’t want any characters. They wanted archetypes and scares. I wrote the script. 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.”
Ok. First of all, their standard audience for this film is the same audience who are freakin’ fans of Stephen King books and horror movies! Does Warner Bros. really understand who their audience is for this kind of project? I guess not. It makes me wonder if any of the executives even bothered to read the book that the film is based on. You seriously can’t make a proper King adaptation without making it offensive. The studio is basically going to dumb down the story for the audience, which is bullshit! They don’t give their audience enough credit. The director went on to talk about what he wanted to do with Pennywise the Clown:
“The main difference was making Pennywise more than just the clown. After 30 years of villains that could read the emotional minds of characters and scare them, trying to find really sadistic and intelligent ways he scares children, and also the children had real lives prior to being scared. And all that character work takes time. It’s a slow build, but it’s worth it, especially by the second film. But definitely even in the first film, it pays off.”
The book itself is a slow burn! Why the hell is the studio so hell-bent on changing that!? They think they know what’s best for the film, but if this is really they case, then it proves that they don’t. Whoever is spearheading this project at the studio shouldn’t be making movies because they are taking out everything that makes this story so damn good. Fukunaga continued:
“It was being rejected. Every little thing was being rejected and asked for changes. Our conversations weren’t dramatic. It was just quietly acrimonious. We didn’t want to make the same movie. We’d already spent millions on pre-production. I certainly did not want to make a movie where I was being micro-managed all the way through production, so I couldn’t be free to actually make something good for them. I never desire to screw something up. I desire to make something as good as possible.”
Damn, that’s frustrating to hear. I’m glad he walked away from it instead of making a film that just seemed to get shittier and shittier the more the executives touched it.
“We invested years and so much anecdotal storytelling in it. Chase and I both put our childhood in that story. So our biggest fear was they were going to take our script and bastardize it. So I’m actually thankful that they are going to rewrite the script. I wouldn’t want them to stealing our childhood memories and using that. I mean, I’m not sure if the fans would have liked what I would had done. I was honoring King’s spirit of it, but I needed to update it. King saw an earlier draft and liked it.”
If King signed off on it, that’s all that matters. What a sad fate for a film that could have been absolutely great. The studio ended up hiring Mama director Andy Muschietti to take on the project, which doesn't spark much confidence. Mama was a very mediocre film that got laughably bad by the time the third act rolled around.
The studio should have just let Fukunaga do his thing. It sounds like he would delivered a film that fans of the book would have loved. Now we’re just going to get some watered down version that probably won’t even end up being as good as the 1990 TV miniseries.
