Posted on Thursday, July 1st, 2010 by Peter Sciretta
In early 2009, it was announced that Warner Bros was developing a big screen adaptation of Stephen King‘s novel IT. They hired screenwriter Dave Kajganich , who wrote the initial drafts of The Invasion, to pen the screenplay adaptation. We haven’t heard much about the project since. But now we have an update, after the jump.
Posted on Sunday, April 5th, 2009 by Peter Sciretta
Screenwriter Dave Kajganich tells Dread Central that the big screen remake of Stephen King‘s It will be “set in the mid-1980s and in the present almost equally — mirroring the twenty-odd-year gap King uses in the book”. But more importantly, the film “will not be PG-13. This will be R.” Kajganich explains that the R-Rating “means we can really honor the book and engage with the traumas (both the paranormal ones and those they deal with at home and school) that these character endure.”
Of course, the book is 1,104 pages and Kajganich confirms that Warner Bros wants to adapt the novel for a single film, which means a lot of the source material will have to be cut. The television movie was criticized for being vastly different from the book in order to keep the running time down to 192 minutes. I seriously doubt the theatrical film version will be even close to that long. Two of the other big criticisms of the television movie were that it had been sanitized for public airing (sex/violence) and suffered from budgetary limitations. From the sound of it, the new film will address some of those concerns.
When I was younger, I read a lot of Stephen King books. Over the years, Hollywood has turned a lot of King’s library of work into crappy horror adaptations — The Shining and Carrie might be the two exceptions. For a writer known primarily as a horror novelist, it’s surprising that the movie adaptations of his non-horror stories, like Green Mile, Stand By Me and The Shawshank Redemption, are probably better known, and definitely more revered.
But if you asked me when I was 11-years old, what my favorite Stephen King movie was, I would quickly tell you — the 1990 television miniseries adaptation of It. It scared me, kept me up, and I loved it. I remember rewatching the VHS copy that I had recorded off of cable, over and over again. Well, guess what? Warner Bros is remaking the novel for the big screen.
