Pennywise Returns September 2019
The kids in Stephen King’s IT got to wait 27 years before their second encounter with the demon Pennywise; we’ll only have to wait two years. We’re probably more eager for the return encounter than those kids, however, since our lives aren’t on the line.
The sequel to IT, which might be called IT: Chapter Two, will hit theaters, including IMAX houses, on September 6, 2019, almost exactly two years after the arrival of the first chapter. Even with that info, we've still got more questions about the sequel than Stephen King could answer in a thousand pages.
The Hollywood Reporter announces the date, but we’re still pretty thin on details.
We know that Gary Dauberman, who contributed to the screenplay for the first film, will write at least the first draft of the sequel. (His work jumped off from the earlier drafts by original director Cary Fukanaga and co-writer Chase Palmer.)
Director Andy Muschietti is expected to return, though his deal has not been announced, if it is even finalized. His producing partner, Barbara Muschietti (the two are siblings), will presumably also return.
Then there’s the cast.
The first movie, in its final form, was designed as a standalone story, but Stephen King’s original novel bounced back and forth between the characters as children and their adult lives 27 years later as they discover the evil under Derry wasn’t quite as dead as they hoped.
All those adult actors have yet to be chosen and/or announced, but with a release date set and a script in the works we’ll likely start to hear about them soon. And this sequel will show us more of the lives of the kids as seen in the original movie, which means that whole cast will have to return — and waiting too long to shoot means they might look noticeably different in the next movie. While CG could strip back some of those adolescent changes, that’s an expensive route to take.
New Line and Warner Bros. could end up with bigger names for the adults, and also a much larger budget thanks to the outrageous success of the first film. With a timeline firmly in place for the sequel, preliminary answers to all our questions will probably start to appear like freaky balloons in the Derry sewers.