It Chapter Two Director Addresses Lengthy Runtime

Can you smell the cinema, Georgie? There’s peanuts… cotton candy… hot dogs… and hopefully a toilet close by.

The sequel to 2017’s box office horror hit is determined to tell a comprehensive story of the grown-up Losers’ Club coming back to Derry to finish off Pennywise for good, and its director wasn’t about to let one scary minute of the film’s best moments hit the cutting room floor. It Chapter Two director Andy Muschietti has revealed that the film will have a bladder-busting runtime of 2 hours and 45 minutes in a new interview.

“A movie is very different when you’re writing the script and you’re building a story compared to what the final product is,” Muschietti told Digital Spy. “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. However, when you have the movie finally edited and it’s 4 hours long, you realize 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.”

Further Reading: It Chapter Two and the Secrets of Pennywise’s History

If, after you’ve waddled out of It Chapter Two with your legs squished together in search of the nearest bog, you still feel like you were robbed of more time with stars James McAvoy, Jessica Chastain, and Bill Hader, you’re in luck. Producer Barbara Muschietti says that there’s still a ton of great (non-scary) footage that didn’t make the cut.

“We will put out a director’s cut because this time it definitely merits it. We have some amazing scenes that didn’t make it into the movie. You have to make choices sometimes and some things cannot be in this theatrical release but are definitely worthy of people seeing them at a later date.”

It Chapter Two will be released on Sept. 6, which really isn’t too far away now!