Out of all the many Stephen King adaptation that have been released over the past few years, the biggest box office winner was 2017’s It. The adaptation of King’s classic 1987 novel made $327 million worldwide, and expectations are high for the sequel, which arrives in September.
With the release of the sequel imminent, the run time has now been released. In an interview with Digital Spy, director Andy Muschietti revealed that the film will run for a whopping 2 hours and 45 minutes. That’s a full 30 minutes longer than its predecessor. Despite the length, Muschietti seemed confident that fans will enjoy the extended running time.
“At the beginning, when you’re writing and building the beats of the story, everything that you put in there seems very essential to the story,” Muschietti said. “However, when you have the movie finally edited and it’s 4 hours long, you realise that some of the events and some of the beats can be easily lifted but the essence of the story remains intact.
“You cannot deliver a 4-hour movie because people will start to feel uncomfortable–no matter what they see–but we ended up having a movie that is 2 hours and 45 minutes, and the pacing is very good. Nobody who’s seen the movie has had any complaint.”
With the length of the book, the long run time does not surprise me at all. IT: Chapter Two stars James McAvoy as Bill Denbrough, Jessica Chastain as Beverly, Bill Hader as Richie, James Ransone as Eddie, Andy Bean as Stan, and Isaiah Mustafa as Mike. Bill Skarsgård also returns as Pennywise, one of the guises of the terrifying interdimensional entity of the title.
