There are certain things that Empire was always pretty sure we would never see in our lifetime – man landing on Mars. Dirk Kuyt passing to a teammate. A film version of Stephen King’s mammoth novel, It.
The first two are reasonably safe, but the third has come a step closer to becoming reality with today’s news that Warner Bros., presumably emboldened by their success in bringing the allegedly unfilmable Watchmen to the big screen, has announced plans to make It: The Motion Picture.
Screenwriter Dave Kajganich, who wrote The Invasion for Warners and somehow got away with it, has been hired to adapt King’s 1,100+ page novel into a workable, streamlined screenplay. Good luck to him. And when he’s done with that, we’ve got some straw lying around the office that needs to be spun into gold.
Of course, It – the story of a group of childhood friends who battle unspeakable evil, in the form of a corrosive force named It, and then reunite 25 years later to attempt to destroy it once and for all – has been adapted before, back in 1990.
But that was a mini-series, directed by Tommy Lee Wallace, which granted time to develop the book’s characters and themes. Usually, the glass is half-full here at Empire, but we can’t see any way that Kajganich, who is setting the story in the present day instead of 1985, can condense the wonderful novel into a movie without losing the quirks, edge and complexities of the source material.
Having said that, we would also love to see Pennywise the Clown – so memorably brought to sinister life last time around by Tim Curry – on the big screen. God, we’re so conflicted!
Lin Pictures and Vertigo Entertainment are producing for WB.