'It' Director's Cut Will Have 15 More Minutes Of Footage; Freddy Krueger Almost Appeared

Andy Muschietti's It feels like it's running a well-deserved victory lap right now and the film has only been out for a week. But it's already a bonafide smash hit, crushing box office records and the film, which is unquestionably a horror movie, provides a whole new generation with a different incarnation of Pennywise to fear. And now there's good news for those of you who loved this movie as much as we did: an It director's cut is on the way with 15 minutes of extra footage. Read about which restored scenes will be included, and also find out why Muschietti axed the idea to have horror film icon Freddy Krueger pop up in a cameo.

Muschietti and his sister Barbara (who produced the film) told Yahoo Movies that Warner Bros. has just asked them to create a director's cut for the film's home video release that's scheduled to hit shelves later this year. And Andy teased what it will include:

"There's a great scene, it's a bit of a payoff of the Stanley Uris plot which is the bar mitzvah, in which he delivers a speech against all expectations in the room. He goes on with a speech that is completely unexpected, and it's basically blaming all the adults of Derry [for the town's history of deadly "accidents" and child disappearances], and it has a great resolution...

There's a very funny bit in the quarry...after the spitting contest, it escalates into something that's completely weird and irrelevant to the scene, but it's so funny. Jack Grazer, playing Eddie, he does something that is completely bonkers."

That's a great tease – what could Eddie possibly do that could earn that adjective? – but anything involving more of the Losers' Club hanging out and spending time together is sure to make fans happy.

Meanwhile, it turns out that there was one point in this movie's long production history that included a scene in which Freddy Krueger shows up to terrorize the kids. In Stephen King's original novel, the shapeshifting entity often seen as Pennywise takes the shape of the Wolfman to frighten the kids after they see a scary movie, and it sounds like something similar may have been tossed around here. Muschietti tells Ain't It Cool News:

"We considered that for a bit, but I wasn't too interested in bringing Freddy Krueger into the mix. I love the story and I love how Stephen King basically makes a portrait of childhood in the '50s. He's very genuine when he brings all the Universal Monsters to the repertoire of incarnation because that's what kids were afraid of. It would be a natural path to try to recreate that in the '80s, but I really wasn't too crazy about bringing stuff like Freddy Krueger into the story. I thought it was a bit too meta with New Line involved in the film. It's distracting and it didn't feel right, for some reason."

As surprising as that may have been in the moment, I think they ultimately made the right call: seeing Freddy yukking it up would have been too distracting, especially when Bill Skarsgard is doing such interesting work crafting a new version of Pennywise before our eyes.

Are you looking forward to heading back to Derry and seeing the It director's cut?