“IT: Chapter Two” director Andy Muschietti surprised horror fans on Saturday as the filmmaker confirmed that the sequel’s running time currently stands at a whopping 2 hours and 45 minutes — and he seems perfectly fine with it:
"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 mentioned at a Junket. "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 realise that some of the events and some of the beats can be easily lifted but the essence of the story remains intact.
He continued on:
"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."
This is a very ambitious move on the part of Warner Bros. Will it pay off? The studio clearly has a lot of confidence in this movie. Of course, as you know, this past April’s “Avengers: Endgame” clocked in at an astounding 3 hours and 2 minutes and just became the highest-grossing movie of all-time. Of course, when “IT: Chapter Two” comes out on September 6th, it won’t be able to dethrone Endgame, but it’ll be curious to see how well ‘Chapter Two’ fares at the box-office.
The ‘Smile’ franchise has a new director. David Bruckner, who made “The Night House” and the 2022 “Hellraiser” reboot, has been hired to direct “Smile 3” for Paramount.