![]() ![]() Despite the formidable Stephen King brand, It was turned into a pretty good miniseries 27 years ago. To get close to that mysterious end of the equation, Deadline is repeating our Most Valuable Blockbuster tournament for 2017, using data culled by seasoned and trusted sources.ĭespite the eerie short film turned into the horror feature Mama that showed such promise in the sibling Argentinian duo Andy & Barbara Muschietti, no one could have predicted that It would scare up as much business as it did to become the sleeper fright phenomenon that it did. ![]() The true tale is told when production budgets, P&A, talent participations and other costs collide with box office grosses and ancillary revenues from VOD to DVD and TV. Kudos on that last laugh, Duffers.When it comes to evaluating the financial performance of top movies, it isn’t about what a film grosses at the box office. In a slightly ironic twist, you may walk out feeling “It” was a good-enough imitation of “Stranger Things” - the Netflix show whose creators, the Duffer brothers, made it after Warner Brothers wouldn’t give them a shot at this movie. End titles reveal that this is merely Chapter 1 of the author’s enormous tome, so there will presumably be more to come. Real ugliness, the moments in this film that’ll chill you, is delivered by flesh-and-blood bullies, like switchblade-toting psychopath Henry (Nicholas Hamilton) and his mean dimwit buddies, who linger after school to terrorize the chubby Ben (Jeremy Ray Taylor), and Beverly’s leering father (Stephen Bogaert), who asks his daughter with a stomach-churning glint in his eye if she’s still his little girl.Įven a kid’s tremulous descent into a basement - one that’s devoid of clowns - will give you the shivers, largely thanks to King, who’s made a career of imbuing the darkness with all of our most personalized fears. #KING IT FULL MOVIE 2017 UPDATE#The screenplay, co-written by Cary Fukunaga (director of the first “True Detective” season), gets pubescent-boy banter just right, littering dialogue with F-bombs and your-moms and generally making it a hugely enjoyable throwback to earlier King movies like “Stand by Me” (with Finn Wolfhard’s chatterbox Richie a nice update on a young Corey Feldman). But the literal ghouls here take a back seat to the subtler ones, which are really where “It” shines darkly. Regardless, director Andy Muschietti (“Mama”) fails to heed the horror-movie rule that what isn’t shown is always scarier than what is, and since we meet Pennywise head-on within the first few minutes, it’s diminishing returns after that. This could be, of course, because we are all simply oversaturated right now with the stuff of nightmares, be it “The Walking Dead” or the daily headlines. #KING IT FULL MOVIE 2017 TV#Pennywise, the clown who feeds on fear: So freaky on the page, so tough to nail down on-screen! Skarsgård’s malevolent, grinning creep is a definite improvement on the hammy Tim Curry incarnation from the 1990 TV miniseries but never really comes into his own as the true stuff of nightmares. Soon Pennywise is popping up all over town in various customized guises: a leper for the hypochondriac Eddie (Jack Dylan Grazer), a slab in a slaughterhouse for farm kid Mike (Chosen Jacobs), dead Georgie for Bill and, most poignant, a geyser of blood for Beverly (Sophia Lillis, working a strong Molly Ringwald vibe), who’s just gotten her first period. ![]() Georgie’s subsequent disappearance brings together a gang of scrawny, brainy kids, led by Georgie’s stuttering older brother Bill (Jaeden Lieberher), to look for him - and find out why so many other kids in their town are suddenly going missing. It’s the late ’80s in Derry, Maine, and little Georgie (Jackson Robert Scott) floats his paper boat down a rainy street and right into a drain, where a sewer-dwelling clown who introduces himself as Pennywise (Bill Skarsgård) offers it back to him. This adaptation of one of his fattest novels succeeds admirably on that score, even if its overt boogeymen come up a bit short. ![]() If you’re one of Stephen King’s “constant readers,” as he calls us, you’ll know the horror master is prone to luring you in with supernatural scares, then revealing his human characters to be equally capable of rank monstrousness. Rated R (profanity, violence, disturbing images). ![]()
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