Stephen King’s It Postponed As Director Quits

“Wanna balloon, Georgie…?” Well, looks like you have to wait for it a little while longer, as the news breaks that the long-in development big screen take on Stephen King’s ‘It’ has been shelved for the time being, due to the eleventh hour withdrawal of director Cary Fukunaga.

The Wrap reports that Fukunaga (best known for helming the entire first season of TV’s ‘True Detective’) quit the New Line Cinema production, intended to be an epic two-film adaptation of King’s gargantuan 1,138 page novel, over budget cuts and creative conflicts.

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Reportedly, the director “repeatedly clashed with the studio and did not want to compromise his artistic vision.” Subsequently, the film “will not move forward as planned this summer and has been pushed indefinitely.”

This news comes not long after the first and doubtless most significant bit of casting on the project, as young British actor Will Poulter was the surprise choice to portray iconic antagonist Pennywise the Clown - the role taken by Tim Curry in the 1990 TV mini-series.

It would seem that Poulter’s connection to the project might now be up in the air, given that he was cast by Fukunaga - and The Wrap intimate the studio might not have been entirely happy with his casting in the first place.

It’s also claimed that Australian actor Ben Mendelsohn had been a contender for Pennywise, but passed when New Line wanted him to take “a sizable pay cut.” Reportedly, Fukunaga was also unhappy with New Line’s refusal to let him shoot in New York, due to it being more expensive than comparable US locations.

On top of all this, The Wrap also suggest New Line would prefer to make a single film, as opposed to the two volumes Fukunaga had in mind.

Exactly how much New Line have cut from ‘It’s budget is not specified (reportedly they “greenlit the first film at $30 million”). However, a rather worrying potential reason for the studio getting cold feet over ’It’ is said to be the opening weekend under-performance of the new ‘Poltergeist’ remake - because this film “featured a clown in its marketing materials.”

We can but hope this last claim proves inaccurate - and we would suggest that relative audience disinterest in a new take on ‘Poltergeist’ owes less to the presence of clowns in the marketing than the fact that audiences have seen the story before in the original 1982 ‘Poltergeist,’ a genre classic which still holds up to this day.

‘It,’ on the other hand, has not been on the big screen before - and while the 1990 mini-series may have its admirers, many more would surely agree that it was just too small-scale and low budget to really do King’s epic horror story justice.

On a side note, things seem to have gone a little quiet over at New Line’s parent company Warner Bros (where ‘It’ was initially based) with their in-development adaptation of another of Stephen King’s biggest novels, ‘The Stand.’ Director Josh Boone is attached and there has been word of a similar multi-film adaptation, but there’s been no news for some time, and Boone has subsequently been linked to 20th Century Fox’s ‘X-Men’ spin-off ‘The New Mutants.’

Meanwhile, another King adaptation, ‘Cell,’ is expected to hit screens later this year.

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Picture Credit: Warner Bros, WENN