Cary Fukunaga was going to film Pennywise the clown's Derry-based reign of terror this summer, but it's now been revealed that Fukunaga has left the director's chair of New Line's adaptation of Stephen King's IT, with principal photography delayed as a result.
TheWrap reports the news of Fukunaga's departure from IT, revealing that the True Detective director felt creatively compromised as the film approached the start of filming in mid-June. Production on the IT movie is now postponed and it's not certain how soon Fukunaga will be replaced or when production on the project will move forward.
Warner Bros. subsidiary New Line Cinema (which took on the IT film last May) recently requested budget cuts on the adaptation of Stephen King's IT (initially approved for a $30 million budget) and are strongly considering trimming the project down to one film, which conflicted with Fukunaga and Chase Palmer's ambitious two-movie screenplay adaptation of the epic 1986 novel. Fukunaga and Palmer's scripts followed the Losers Club as kids in the first film and as adults in the follow-up. Though Fukunaga was never attached to direct the second IT film, there was a strong possibility that he would have returned to helm the second film.
Deciding on final shooting locations was also problematic, with Fukunaga strongly seeking a (potentially costly) New York City shoot. The budget concerns also affected the casting of Pennywise the clown. Fukunaga wanted Ben Mendelsohn (Bloodline) to play the part, but the actor reportedly passed on the role due to a proposed pay cut, leading Fukunaga to then select Will Poulter (We're the Millers, The Maze Runner) as the frontrunner for Pennywise. It's uncertain at this time whether or not Poulter will still be lined up for the juicy antagonistic role moving forward.
The rocky weekend opening (approximately $23 million) of the Poltergeist remake was listed as another potential reason for New Line's budget cuts and wariness of a two-film IT adaptation, as Poltergeist advertisements prominently feature a clown doll dishing out onscreen scares.
Seth Grahame-Smith (Pride and Prejudice and Zombies) and David Katzenberg are producing IT, along with Roy Lee, Dan Lin, and Doug Davison.
As King fans remember, IT was adapted for the screen once before in 1990, as a two-part miniseries that aired on ABC. Tim Curry (The Rocky Horror Picture Show) played Pennywise in the miniseries, and in the wake of the disappointing news of Fukunaga's departure from the IT feature film, King reminded fans via Twitter that no matter what happens with this latest IT adaptation, we'll always have Curry's nightmare-inducing performance to remember (as well as the magnificent source material). For those unfamiliar with King's novel, IT, we have the synopsis below.
The remake of IT may be dead--or undead--but we'll always have Tim Curry. He's still floating down in the sewers of Derry.
— Stephen King (@StephenKing) May 25, 2015
“A promise made twenty-eight years ago calls seven adults to reunite in Derry, Maine, where as teenagers they battled an evil creature that preyed on the city’s children. Unsure that their Losers Club had vanquished the creature all those years ago, the seven had vowed to return to Derry if IT should ever reappear. Now, children are being murdered again and their repressed memories of that summer return as they prepare to do battle with the monster lurking in Derry’s sewers once more.”
Cary Fukunaga:
Raised on a steady diet of R.L. Stine’s Goosebumps books and Are You Afraid of the Dark?, Derek has been fascinated with fear since he first saw ForeverWare being used on an episode of Eerie, Indiana.
When he’s not writing about horror as the Senior News Reporter for Daily Dead, Derek can be found daydreaming about the Santa Carla Boardwalk from The Lost Boys or reading Stephen King and Brian Keene novels.
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