It is poised to rescue the movie business after the most dismal late summer box office in recent memory, with a massive opening weekend expected for the Stephen King adaptation. And with the film's practically guaranteed financial success, a sequel is all but assured. But what would an It sequel look like? After all, there is just one book to base the movie on, so where will the material come from for part two?
There may just be one It book, but it's a massive book. That's why the people behind the It film have always conceived of splitting the novel into two movies. The It movie does not tell the whole story of the book, it tells roughly half the story, meaning the other half of the book is being saved for the sequel to the film. Fans of the novel will recall that the story takes place across two time periods, with our heroes of the Losers' Club first encountering Pennywise the Dancing Clown as children in the 1950s, and then coming across him again as adults some three decades later. The film is using this time divide to split up the films as well, with the first movie taking place entirely in the past, which has been moved up to the 1980s, and featuring the childhood incarnation of the Losers Club. But that doesn't necessarily mean the sequel will take place entirely in the present day.
While It 2 will largely focus on the adult Losers' Club members thirty years later, it will still periodically flash back to the 1980s and again feature the characters as kids throughout the film. "There will be a dialogue between the two timelines, which is something that I love from the book," director Andy Muschietti told Yahoo! Movies' Tom Butler. "So it’s not just the [Losers’ Club as] adults, we’re going to come back to 1989." Muschietti also revealed that the sequel will explore the more interdimensional aspect of the novel, which presumably includes the other horrifying creatures Pennywise can become, which does not come into play in the first movie in order to preserve some mystery about the monster.
"Getting in to that other dimension — the other side — was something that we could introduce in the second part," the director said. "In the book the perspective of the writing… is always with the Losers, so everything they know about Pennywise is very speculative and shrouded in absurdity, so [in the first film] I wanted to respect that mystery feeling of not knowing what’s on the other side … I also wanted to leave something for the second half, so I didn’t want to get in trouble with that — going into the macroverse or that transdimensional stuff — and keep it grounded, from the point of view of the kids. There’s another movie to expand into that."
So for fans of the It book who leave the It movie wondering what happened to the adult versions of the characters and the otherworldly origins of Pennywise, don't worry, those details are coming in the eventual sequel.
