The MTV Movie & TV Awards did more than show how woke they were. They also premiered a new trailer for “It,” the big, splashy take on one of Stephen King’s most beloved bestsellers. The film doesn’t arrive till September 8, but the advertising campaign has been aggressive about getting the word out early — and especially about ensuring Bill Skarsgard’s incarnation of demonic, shape-shifting, sometime-clown/monster Pennywise will haunt our dreams all summer long.
We get a full-on (if quickie) look at the guy at the very end of the new trailer, which is also something like a clip. In fact, most of it is one scene, with our four boys (minus the token girl) investigating some grimy tunnel near their idyllic suburban home. And they banter. Boy, do they banter. They banter just like they did in King’s 1986 novel — shooting the stuff and flinging quips and not doing much else. Presumably much of it comes directly from the book, which absolutely teems with it. There’s so much of it in the book that that’s probably why, at 1,138 pages, it clocks in at almost as long as “War and Peace.”
This new “It” also feels spookier than the last big adaptation of the book: the two-part TV miniseries from 1990, which had to cut (or hide) most of the gorier stuff so that it could air on ABC. That one had no less than Tim Curry as a hammy/scary Pennywise, plus the late Jonathan Brandis as the kid version of one of our heroes. It also had three hours to bang out a super-long novel — but we’re guessing “It” will work just fine if you gut it down to around two hours.
When it his theaters, “It” will be the second King movie adaptation in about a month, with “The Dark Tower” arriving in early August. Here’s hoping they kick off a renaissance of good King movies — because remember, apart from some film classics from the ’70s through the early ’90s (“Carrie,” “The Shining,” “Misery”), most Stephen King movies are super-bad.
Watch the trailer below:
