Genre: Horror
Premise: The “Losers Club” comes back to their home town of Derry 27 years later to destroy the evil presence known as Pennywise, who’s returned to feast on more children.
About: It Chapter 1 became the biggest horror movie of all time, grossing 123 million domestically in its first weekend and topping off with 700 million worldwide. So the industry was a little surprised when they saw a number south of 100 million this weekend for the sequel (it grossed 91 million). It’s still a big success. But not as much of a success as everyone was hoping for. Might Carson know what the problem was? I think he might. Warner Brother’s tip-top horror scribe, Gary Dauberman, who writes all the Conjuring movies, came back to pen the It sequel.
Writer: Gary Dauberman
Details: 169 minutes
Warner Brothers is busy trying to figure out why the sequel to their monster horror hit, “It,” did 30 million less in its opening weekend than the first film. They don’t need to look far. Just type this address into your search bar: “Scriptshadow.” Because I’m about to tell them exactly what went wrong. Are you ready, WB?
No Chris Pratt.
Paying Chris Pratt 30 million dollars to play Ben Hanscom would’ve gotten you an extra 40-50 million at the box office this weekend. At the very least, it would’ve gotten you even with the last film. Instead we got someone named Jay Ryan who was the acting equivalent of an old bar of soap.
No Chris Pratt was symbolic of a bigger problem here – which was that the casting stunk. There wasn’t a single grown-up character who worked outside of Bill Hader’s Richie Tozier. The actor who played the guy who stayed behind, Mike Hanlon, was criminally dull. Whenever he spoke, I took a nap. The guy who played Eddie was only compelling in that he so closely resembled the actor who played him as a child. It was eerie. Jessica Chastain was supposed to be a slam dunk but ended up being a 20 foot jumper in a game that got out of hand in the 2nd quarter. James McAvoy brought an element of professionalism to these Elizabeth Mestnik Acting Studio rejects, but even he’s fairly vanilla here.
That left Bill Hader to do all the heavy lifting and despite trying his best, he couldn’t do it. “It” is a story more dependent on its characters and their camaraderie than 99% of the movies out there. So if the actors blow it, the movie’s doomed. And the actors blew it. Well, the director and casting director blew it cause they hired nobodies. This is a movie that needed star power. Or, at the very least, it needed proven character actors who we’ve seen before. Here are some names people were throwing out after the first film: Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Adam Scott, Mike White, Edward Norton, DJ Qualls. You can’t just throw Dipsy Dan whose last TV appearance was getting slimed on Nickelodeon 30 years ago and expect audiences to embrace it. I’m baffled by these choices. I’d go so far as to call it the biggest bungling of a cast in history.
Despite this gigantic mistake, the movie had a tiny chance to crawl back into respectability if the script was good.
Buuuuut. If you saw It: Chapter 2, you know that that script was very very very not good.
The only part of the script that possessed any structure whatsoever was the first act. And the only reason is because it was so clear what needed to happen. They had to get everyone to Derry. But once they got there, I don’t know if the writer started doing shrooms or everyone on the crew was encouraged to journal their ideas each morning and whichever entry caught director Andy Muschietti’s eye got filmed. But there were literally two and a half good scenes in the second and third acts. Which means there were over 2 hours of awful scenes. The first good scene was Jessica Chastain visiting the old woman. The second good scene was the Pennywise scene underneath the bleachers. And the half was Bill Hader taking on Paul Bunyun.
Outside of that, it was all BAAAAAAD. Really really bad messy uninspired nonsensical jibberish. To the point where I was actually angry with the director.
Let me give you some insight into screenwriting here. 99 times out of 100, when a movie is in that 2 hours and 45 minutes to 3 hour length? It represents a writer and director who have lost track of their story. They don’t know how to focus things because they don’t understand what their story is about. When you don’t understand what your story is about, you throw everything on the screen and pray that the audience does the work for you. “Maybe they’ll figure it out,” you think, even though they never do (by the way, I’m hearing Star Wars Episode 9 is going to be the same length as It: 2 — not encouraging).
This was honestly 20 horror movie shorts that I’m guessing were decided on long before they wrote the script, and the writer was given the directive to stitch them together in some desperate manner that made sense. Well, Operation FAILURE.
I sensed the script was in trouble almost immediately. Actually, I knew it was in trouble in the very first scene. Pennywise eats kids, right? That’s his thing. So why does the teaser have him killing a man? You’ve violated the main rule of your universe in the very first scene. Then you had the the kids flashbacks. Sure, they helped remind us who was who. But this movie had zero momentum. And you were choking the little momentum it had every time you flashed backwards. DON’T FLASH BACK PEOPLE! FLASHBACKS ARE ALMOST ALWAYS BAD.
The script really went into the tank when everyone bizarrely agreed to go off on their own to find their “unique artifact.” It wasn’t clear why they needed to be alone. It would’ve been a lot safer had they worked together. But NOPE – classic beginner horror screenwriter logic – shaky motivation to get the characters alone so we can have some scares.
I wish I had something good to say about this movie but I don’t have respect for films where they don’t try with the script. All they seemed to care about was the production. And make no mistake, it’s going to cost them. We don’t live in a world anymore where studios can con consumers for 3 to 4 weeks before it’s established that a movie’s bad. The consumer knows instantly now. And there’s no question had the script been better, people would’ve come out of those advanced screenings excited, which would’ve built more buzz, and you would have charged into this weekend instead of stumbled.
I finally caught another horror movie this weekend – Ma – and this film suffered from the exact same problem as It 2. Where you can really see the contrast between what these movies could’ve been and what they were is by watching their trailers. If you watched that first It: 2 trailer, it was EXTREMELY FOCUSED. It was a single scene of Jessica Chastain going to meet a creepy old woman. Yet the movie was nothing like that. It was all freaking over the place. Same thing with Ma. When you watched that trailer, it looked like a group of high school kids who take a wrong turn and get stuck in this woman’s house partying all night, and then that woman goes crazy on them. But the movie was nothing like that. They go to her house, then they go back to school, then they go to the house again the next weekend, then back to school, then they come back there and party sometimes. But sometimes they don’t…
What do I tell you guys? What is one of the precious Three Commandments in screenwriting. URGENCY. If you want instant focus? Add urgency! A huge reason why both these movies rambled was because everyone had all the time in the world! When you can just wander around town looking for scary clowns, of course things are going to get boring! You need a goal and you need that goal to come with a ticking clock. Especially when it comes to horror, which thrives on tight timelines. Just like Friday’s Amateur “worth the read” script, Grisly. They’re not going to be fighting this bear in three weeks. If they were, we would’ve checked out. They’re fighting it tonight. And only one side is getting out alive.
Man, where do we go from here? I think they’re going to try and make more sequels to this movie. But I hope not. You had such a great memory with the original film. This already taints it. I would leave this property be.
[ ] What the hell did I just watch?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the price of admission
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: It’s one of the most basic components of a strong story: Focus. And yet time and time again, screenwriters abandon it. I don’t understand. Start with a goal. Add a little urgency. Make sure the stakes are high and clear. Your script will be focused. Start with 7 people. Have them sort of remember their childhood but sort of not. Tell them they have to each get an artifact because the guy who stayed home did a lot of studying and he thinks that’s important, spend the next 2 hours writing disconnected short horror films, spend an hour wandering around a cave – that’s not focus. And that’s why this movie was a disaster.
