‘It’ Director Says Sequel Will Explore Pennywise’s Inter-Dimensional Nature

From the American version of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo to The Golden Compass, Hollywood has been known to hope an adaptation of a novel will result in a successful franchise, only for the initial installment to disappoint, nixing any plans of continuing the series. With a week to go until its release, the fate of the latest adaptation of Stephen King‘s It is up in the air, but director Andy Muschietti already has plans of how he’ll continue to bring the story to life.

The original novel weighs in at over 1,100 pages, telling the tale of a group of kids who band together to fight an evil entity plaguing their town, killing and tormenting kids for its pleasure. The kids attempt to neutralize the threat, only to realize 27 years later that they must once again band together to truly vanquish their foe.

A mini-series of the story was produced in 1990, with the story being told in two parts, clocking in at over three hours to tell the epic story.

Rather than try to cram everything from the book into one feature film, Muschietti has decided to focus solely on the young kids battling “It,” a story which will still clock in at two hours and fifteen minutes.

In the story’s continuation, Muschietti revealed he’d like to dig deeper into a realm of the entity not fully explored in the previous adaptation.

“I wanted to respect that mystery feeling…”

When speaking with Yahoo! Movies, Muschietti explained his intentions with the initial film, saying, “I really wanted to focus on the emotional journey of the group of kids.”

He added, “Getting in to that other dimension — the other side — was something that we could introduce in the second part. In the book the perspective of the writing… is always with the Losers[‘ Club], so everything they know about Pennywise is very speculative and shrouded in absurdity, so I wanted to respect that mystery feeling of not knowing what’s on the other side.”

The most iconic image of the villain from the story is that of Pennywise the clown, portrayed by Tim Curry in the 1990 series. However, the actual entity takes various forms throughout the story, ranging from a leper to a werewolf, depending on who it’s trying to frighten.

“I didn’t want to get in trouble with that…”

Many audiences who are familiar with the previous adaptation of the story remember it quite fondly, but when viewing it in 2017, the effects of the more cosmic experiences don’t hold up, due to the restraints of the budget and platform of the time. Muschietti seemed to hint at wanting to prove the concept of the film to be a success before getting too ambitious.

The director revealed, “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.”

He added, “There’s another movie to expand into that. Also, there’s a physical truth that it’s a movie that has a budget. And I didn’t want to get into a depiction of a realm that f**ks up our budget, the creation of a world that will basically suck up half of our budget, and would have to sacrifice a lot of things.”

“There will be a dialogue between the two timelines…”

The source material intertwined the two timelines of the Losers’ Club, much in the same way the mini-series did. While there’s no announced plans for when a second part would begin filming, the director already knows what the structure will be.

“There will be a dialogue between the two timelines,” he confessed, “which is something that I love from the book. So it’s not just the [Losers’ Club as] adults, we’re going to come back to 1989.”

Reports on possible start dates for the second part of the story have varied, with Muschietti saying that the next film is his priority while the screenwriters of the first installment, Seth Grahame-Smith and David Katzenberg, claim there’s “no timeline” of when shooting would start.

If Muschietti plans to shoot new footage of the young actors, he’ll have to begin shooting soon, as the kids have already undergone growth spurts that potentially could make them look drastically different in the second film.

It lands in theaters September 8.