Streamin’ King: ‘IT: Chapter Two’ Confidently Brings Stephen King’s Story Into The 21st Century

Welcome to Streamin’ King, a series grave-digging through the myriad Stephen King adaptations available on your favorite streaming services. This time we’re watching IT Chapter Two, the 2019 film based on the 1986 novel, and sequel to the 2017 smash.

STREAMIN’ KING: IT: CHAPTER TWO

THE GIST: Two years after IT became the highest-grossing horror movie of all time (and 29 years after the hallowed TV adaptation with Tim Curry), Chapter Two picked up with the Losers’ Club as seven childless adults, all but one of them tremendously successful and far from Derry. As children in 1989—which we flash back to frequently here, in predominantly new material—they failed to fully end their Maine town’s ancient menace, a shapeshifting eater of kids and worlds which returns every 27 years to feed. Beckoned back by the friend who stayed, the Losers start regaining their wiped memories of the experience as they prepare to face It deep beneath the town again, this time to the death.
PEDIGREE: Joining the fun as the adult Losers’ Club are two-time Oscar nominee Jessica Chastain as Bev, Bill Hader (two Golden Globe noms) as Mike, James McAvoy (one Globe nom) as Bill, Isaiah Mustafa (Shadowhunters) as Mike, New Zealand’s Jay Ryan (the CW’s Beauty & the Beast) as Ben, James Ransone (The Wire‘s Ziggy) as Eddie, and Andy Bean as Stan; he starred in this year’s imploded Swamp Thing series, co-created by It screenwriter Gary Dauberman, now penning a ‘Salem’s Lot movie.
Back for round two are director Andy Muschietti and producer/sister Barbara Muschietti (Mama), Globe-nominated composer Benjamin Wallfisch (Blade Runner 2049), and the little prodigies: Finn Wolfhard (Stranger Things, 2020’s Ghostbusters: Afterlife), Sophia Lillis (Sharp Objects), Jaeden Martell (Knives Out, with Dolores Claiborne‘s Christopher Plummer), Jeremy Ray Taylor (Are You Afraid of the Dark?), Jack Dylan Grazer (Shazam!), and Wyatt Oleff. Plus, of course, Chosen Jacobs and Bill Skarsgård, who acted opposite each other in semi-similar roles in Hulu’s King-centric Castle Rock. Cinematographer Checco Varese (the suitably subterranean The 33) replaces Park Chan-wook mainstay Chung-hoon Chung.
WORTH WATCHING FOR CONSTANT READERS? Imperatively. It‘s a monstrous 1,138 pages; there are so many things an adaptation must tackle to succeed, and Chapter Two aces more than enough of them. Chapter One changed very little for change’s sake; Two, a film whose existence was uncertain until after One wrapped, modifies more. Richie, Eddie, Ben, and Mike’s adult introductions are notably shifted, a quest for tokens is added, the Ritual of Chüd is altered but far more ambitious than any previous onscreen duel with It. Pennywise is less surgically effective (as a scaremonger; he’s as massively inept at his job as ever) and quite absent—except for a glimpse at the beginning, he’s MIA until the (horrific) 45-minute mark. The 2016 setting confidently takes the story into the 21st century for the first time; although One bumps the kids’ golden days from 1958 to 1989, the ’80s were always a quintessential It era, the period in which the novel was published and largely set, ditto the 1990 miniseries. The grown-up actors have lived in an It-suffused world for decades, something none of the prior 21 Losers’ Club performers could claim. Several, like McAvoy, are Constant Readers themselves.

Ed, Ben, and Stan are achingly exact matches for their kid selves’ looks and mannerisms; Bev and Bill are the least triumphant, while Mike, Richie, and Bowers land somewhere in between. The casting is on point across the board though.
*BRIEF SPOILERS*
Two gives warmer resolutions to some things that were tough to swallow about the book: the Losers keep their memories (“we have more we want to remember than we want to forget”), Mike not only joins in the adult fight against It but leads it, we witness Ben and Bev’s happy ending, Richie and Eddie’s romantic tragedy is underscored. No eggs in It’s lair and no destruction of Derry, although the house on Neibolt Street gets cratered. And we do ultra-briefly get to see It crashing to Earth millions of years ago, which rules.

WORTH WATCHING FOR KING NEWBIES/AGNOSTICS? If you dug the first, yes, with the caveat that more viewers have more, and stronger, issues with Two. It meets and tops the original’s creativity but gets shamelessly “more, more, MORE!!”-ish at times. The visual flair levels up right away, opening on a wider world where One‘s whole universe was its town, and the score settles into a spectacular groove and deftly handles the parallel timelines. Horror tests our limits by design, but it’s worth a warning that Two immediately offers triggering scenes of homophobic murder, brutal wife-battering, cutting/suicide, and a quality and quantity of vomit that will really fuck up folks who can’t handle seeing puke.
The recurring King problem of cribbing from/manufacturing Native American spirituality to explain/combat the supernatural, extending at least as far back as Pet Sematary and “Old Chief Wood’nhead,” gets exhumed as a new contribution to the story here thanks to the made-up Shokopiwah tribe, whose members get no dialogue and are shown only in a foggy drug-haze. “The most galling aspect,” illustrated Sappony writer Nick Martin in the New Republic, is “how blasé a film that is otherwise at least attempting to stake out ground as a compelling exploration of modern fear in a somewhat progressive fashion treated such a blatantly stereotypical depiction of Native religion.” To give the Montana Kaimin‘s Jordynn Paz the last word for now, consider that Muschietti, Dauberman, and company foisted on us a…
“…ridiculous side plot that both creates, exploits and then kills an indigenous tribe all in the frame of two hours. We can’t excuse this bullshit by calling it ‘dated.’ … Dumbing our sacred practices down to hallucinations and ‘rituals,’ reinforces damaging stereotypes that many people in mainstream society believe to be true about our people.”
19 STEPHEN KING TIES, REFERENCES, AND MISCELLANY

1. It Chapter Three isn’t out of the question, with Muschietti and Skarsgård both discussing a prequel. “If we do a third one,” Bill teased, “we will have to make something very different in tone, for it to be a fun third movie and not just beating a dead horse.” Andy said, “He’s been in contact with humans for hundreds of years, every 27 years. So you can imagine the amount of material. It’s always exciting to think of eventually exploring this mythology.” Skarsgård also said King promised to privately share prequel fodder.

2. King’s answer to Muschietti’s request for a cameo was, “Well, you have to consider that I’m a jinx. I jinxed all the movies that I’m in,” the director recalled on a commentary track. “I said, ‘No, I think we can turn that around.’ Of course he was joking.” McAvoy came up with the idea for Bill and the shopkeeper to be antagonistic, and SK’s author son Joe Hill almost played a young version of the character, but it “didn’t have a real dramatic function.” King’s only Chapter Two request was for Paul Bunyan (who has a nearly identical statue in Uncle Stevie’s hometown of Bangor) to do his thing.

3. The consciousness around SK’s career-long struggle with satisfying endings is laid on thickly enough that it’s actually a theme. Three mentions in the first 40 minutes alone (Richie suggests “getting the fuck out of dodge before this ends worse than one of Bill’s books”), and King’s trash-talking cameo is the pinnacle. The author “took it with humor,” per Muschietti.

4. Isaiah Mustafa read It twice in preparation and “just played [the audiobook] all the time” for eight months. Then the guy behind our most well-read character inhaled 14 other SK books, including similarly superlong tomes The Stand, The Tommyknockers, Insomnia, and Under the Dome.

5. Bill Skarsgård’s older brother Alexander (True Blood, Big Little Lies) will continue the family tradition of playing top-tier King villains in The Stand on CBS All Access in 2020; he’s Randall Flagg, also of The Dark Tower, The Eyes of the Dragon, and lots more.

6. Muschietti, who had an early version of Two that ran four hours, said he may do standalone director’s cuts and/or one combining both films and is “happy to basically work on every one of them.” The movies currently total five hours, four minutes, withTwoalone running just 11 minutes shy of the miniseries’ three-hour runtime.

7. Muschietti points out in his commentary that he didn’t merely put a model turtle on a desk “for people who crave the Turtle”—the classroom has a globe in the background, framed just above it. (“See the turtle of enormous girth, on his shell he holds the earth” goes the rhyme about Maturin.) The teddy floating in It’s lair is an everyday child’s plaything, but as Dark Tower and It megafans search for any trace of that tummy-sick celestial tortoise, a bear—another, related Guardian of the Beam—is fun.

8. The symbol on the final door to It’s home gets a faithful representation here; it’s also seen in connection with otherworldly beings in Under the Dome.

9. Bowers’ hospital room wall is plastered with art depicting the moon, the vehicle It uses to speak to him in the book and series. His real role in the endgame, like Bill and Bev’s spouses’, is excised, as is his ride in Christine—although the junk shop has her “CQB 241” license plate.

10. Brandon Crane (young Ben in the miniseries) appears in adult Ben’s intro here, Muschietti’s mini-feint to make viewers think Crane had reprised his role. Crane said his feature film debut was a dream come true and that the Muschiettis “stuck their neck out for me.” More repeat Kingverse actors: Molly Atkinson is Eddie’s wife Myra in addition to playing his mother in both films, Joan Gregson (Mrs. Kersh) did Storm of the Century, Nicholas Hamilton is in The Dark Tower, Owen Teague in Cell. Gretta at the pharmacy (Megan Charpentier) starred in Muschietti’s nixed Hulu pilot for Joe Hill’s Locke & Key. And the Lost Boys poster on Ben’s wall shows Corey Haim of Silver Bullet and Stand By Me‘s Kiefer Sutherland and Corey Feldman.

11. The big Shining nod: bloody Henry pounding on Bev’s bathroom stall, poking his head in with a maniacal “Heeere’s Johnny!” The little Shining nod: Richie vanishing the building-sized Bunyan with an “it’s not real, it’s not real” chant. The tiniest connection: Peter Bogdanovich cameos, and in ’99 reported a New York Times piece memorializing Stanley Kubrick, contextualizing Shining as “his most openly commercial” work. (Bogdanovich’s The Last Picture Show is also significant in King’s Lisey’s Story.)

12. Does Ben’s “your hair is winter fire” haiku suck? By the time it’s been chanted evilly by It-As-Bev and as a hope-mantra by Ben, it’s pretty clear: not great, Haystack. Stick with architecture.

13. IT: Chapter Two was one of four King movies in 2019, alongside April’s Pet Sematary, October’s In the Tall Grass on Netflix, and November’s Doctor Sleep; Ewan McGregor joined James McAvoy in the Scotsmen Playing Adult Versions of King Kids club. Chapter Two grossed $472 million worldwide; the original’s $700M made it the highest-earning horror movie of all time by a wide margin. Two‘s $91 million domestic opener was the second-best in horror history, behind It.

14. During the Colbert visit that gave us the #pennywisesmilechallenge and the intel that animal documentaries inspired Skarsgård’s performance, Bill said his baby daughter has a bedroom “just filled with Pennywise teddy bears,” a result of him being sent a litany of merch.

*SPOILERS THROUGH #19*

15. If the scene in Mrs. Kersh’s house feels like an origin story for Pennywise, aka “my fadder,” it sort of is. Muschietti asked Skarsgård to “go from Bob Gray”—one of the clown’s names, never used onscreen—”to Pennywise … transforming from a creepy man to a fucking crazy clown.” They came up with the face-painting and clawing in the moment.

16. Of his choice to keep the ending (and Pennywise’s inner sanctum) more grounded while honoring the surreal, intergalactic duel of the novel (which “can’t be actually performed” onscreen) Muschietti said on a commentary track: “I’m still telling a human drama. And even though they’re fighting an evil, supernatural force, I wanted to keep this from the perspective of the characters. Even though the final set piece in this movie is pretty stylized and big scale, it’s nowhere near the gargantuan spaces that Stephen King has in the book. … I didn’t want to go to the other side and glimpse into the Macroverse, because I didn’t want to make this a fantasy movie. But at least you can see the gateway. So that throat, which is a reflection of the cave, up there is a gateway from the real world to the Macroverse.” He used the same logic for leaving out the part where Derry crumbles as It’s defeated. Dauberman said the challenge was “How do we tell this visually and it’s going to make sense to people who don’t want to read 10 pages of interdimensional time travel?”

17. Though Pennywise ditches his face to take a true spider form (or get a “OH DEAR JESUS IT IS FEMALE!!” reveal), the Stan’s-Head-Spider could drive an arachnophobe insane. (And recall child Eddie telling Stan “we’re not afraid of fuckin’ spiders” in happier days.) What we see feels a lot like an attack by Mordred from The Dark Tower, and it references Christine director John Carpenter’s The Thing, complete with Richie’s “You’ve gotta be fucking kidding.”

18. Bill typing a story about childhood friendship in his spacious office at the end is super similar to Stand by Me‘s epilogue. The paragraph comes from an It passage about Eddie.

19. The specter of missing child Betty Rispom surfaces at least three times. The leader of Adrian Mellon’s attackers is Katie Lunman, who played Ripsom in the Chapter One; in the Neibolt House facsimile, Betty’s torso-less legs come jaunting out of a closet, whereas her upper half was discovered in One. And outside a drainpipe like the one where the kids found Ripsom’s shoe, a girl’s floating body has one foot missing.

CRITICAL CONSENSUS: A notable dip in enthusiasm—Chapter One holds an 86 percent critics’ score/84 percent audience rating on Rotten Tomatoes, while Two fell to 63 percent from critics/78 percent from viewers. Adjectives like crowded, muddled, overstuffed, unwieldy, unfocused, and repetitive prevailed, with much insistence that the less-present kid actors best their adult counterparts. Even among the negative reviews, sentiments like USA Today‘s “Muschietti inherently understands and captures what King does on the page” were frequent. In a sea of reviews commenting on the runtime, Vulture‘s Angelica Jade Bastién observed that “the members of the Loser’s Club stumble through the horrors of memory with anxious zeal and sometimes frantic humor, but the film needed to dig deeper.”
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL CONTEXT FOR IT (1986): King’s longest book till he added over 300 pages to The Stand in 1990. Followed an impressive ’85 (The Talisman, Eyes of the Dragon, the Bachman novelThinner), preceded an equally major ’87 (The Dark Tower II: The Drawing of the Three,Misery, The Tommyknockers).
Zach Dionne thinks King’s latest makes a jolly gift; come to The Institute for It-esque kids banding together, stay for the satisfying ending.