'It' was the first hardback book I ever bought as a kid. The power of the story was that it created a real sense of nostalgia for the 1958 Maine of Stephen King's childhood, a time and place a full two decades before I was born. I don't want to see a movie that loses that. The 80's was my childhood and I don't see this story working as well in that setting. Kids would be afraid of Freddy Kruger, Jason Vorhees and Darth Vader. Not the Wolfman, a mummy and a giant bird.

Second, 'It' is an 1100 page book. It can not be adapted into a single movie with any hope of accuracy.

How can this possibly honour Stephen King's book 'better' if they up the date to the 1980s? That gets rid of all the pop culture fifties references and that great werewolf / theatre scene. What are they going to do? Replace the werewolf with Freddy Kuger? That's not being faithful to the book. It would be like re-doing Dracula and having it set in the year 2000... Oh, wait... Never mind, someone already drove that to the bank.

In my opinion NO ONE can be a scarier Pennywise than Tim Curry. Tim Curry is a master villain and you can't replace him that easily.

The mini series was great. Not only was it a faithful adoption, it was an outstanding tv series (something that is rare). The constant remaking of films is just a sign of how Hollywood has run out of ideas and needs to cannibalize itself.

The updated time line doesn't make sense. It can't help the back stories. It would only hurt it. The only African boy in the entire suburban town in the sixties, the Jewish boy being an outcast because he's Jewish... that wasn't that common place anymore in the eighties. Changing the time line requires changing the back stories and by default cannot be more faithful to Stephen King's story so that spin is an out right lie. They seem to think the audience is pretty stupid to try to gloss things over to the book fans like that.

Also, I don't care about the rating, the fact is no matter how much gore or sex you add there is never going to be a better Pennywise than Mr. Tim Curry.

Well Mandy as much as i would like to agree with you... i can not... I was born in 78 and much of my childhood was in the 80s. I never saw or met a black person till i was in high school and people i know made fun of the jewish kids around. .. So I dont see this as a problem for an 80s storyline. The wolfman was still scary to me as a child in the 80s despite movies like Teen Wolf with michael J. fox... So I dont think they need to change it to Freddy krueger

sorry for double posting stupid thing told me i failed to enter text properly and my message wouldn't post

It depends on where you grow up, it. The setting is a suburban town in the North East, a more populated part of Maine. I grew up in a suburb of New York. I went to school in the 1980s too. I was in kindergarten in 1986 and my best friend was Jewish and I never had a class without African American students. Now if you're somewhere more rural or in the mountains or the deep south then it's understandable. But the town in Stephen King's It is a fairly modern suburb with a decent sized population (has it's own movie theatre, public schools, ect...), it's not that tiny or isolated and by the eighties a place like that wouldn't be so surprised at seeing an African child or Jewish child. Remember, the present day setting of the original adaptation was that very town in 1990. By that point the town had quite a few people of diverse origins. You'd be lying about the suburbs of Maine to pretend a town of that size had no Jewish kids or African kids in the mid-eighties. It might even act to offend some people from Maine. I recall when Hocus Pocus came out in 1993 (only a few years after the setting of this film) a few people actually in school in Salem Massachusetts complained about how rural Hocus Pocus made Salem look and the lack of cultural diversity in the scene of Max at school. Now these complaints were from a film being made in 1992, set in the more rural part of Massachusetts. Imagine how this film is going to make 1985 Maine look. 85 isn't that far from 1992.

It already had a great cast. Tim Curry is Pennywise, who today could play Pennywise? I don't see a single actor who could live up to Tim Curry today.

Harry Anderson
Dennis Christopher
Richard Masur
Annette O'Toole
Tim Reid
John Ritter
Richard Thomas
Tim Curry

All great actors not to mention Seth Green, Johnathon Brandis

I don't know remaking this movie is really proving a lack of original ideas (what is King saying about this?) I know he liked the TV mini series of The Shining better then Kubicks but really why is anyone going to touch IT?

To those saying that it is unrealistic to believe a town that size would be so xenophobic in the 80s, I have news for you: they are all over. I won't name names, but I know more than a couple of towns in the US that are over 80,000 people in which both Jews and blacks are ostracized. In the towns I am thinking of, Jews are rare, it is possible to go all the way through high school and never see a black in your school because all the blacks are in a different school, mainly because if they decide to try moving into the white areas of town the get the crap beaten out of them. That is today, right now, and it was a hell of a lot more common in the 80s. I don't know about Maine, I've never been there, but towns like that do exist right now in other parts of the country.

jdmimic, please read my post more thoroughly, I was being specific to the area described in Stephen King's novel, a large suburb in the North East (not tiny remote towns in mountain ranges or the deep South). The town in King's novel is very much like the town I grew up in and in 1986 as as child my best friend was Jewish and there were plenty of little African American, Asian and Middle Eastern children in my classes. The town in the book was loosely based on the very town Stephen King grew up in which gained cultural and ethnic diversity through the seventies and was common place in the eighties. Remember, the original mini-series of this ended in 1990 with flash backs into the fifties / early sixties.

To suddenly have it set in a more remote town that had no cultural diversity in the eighties contradicts the book and is an insult to Stephen King's own up bringing of which a good part of the book was based.

To try to make this town more remote is an insult to all of Maine. In 1993 there were people angry at the lack of cultural diversity in Disney's Hocus Pocus so imagine how people will react to this pile of 'realism' about North East Suburbia.

And...

'I don't know about Maine, I've never been there, but towns like that do exist right now in other parts of the country.'

I never said they don't. Please read my post and show enough respect to actually read it. I was being very specific in that the book is set in a more populated suburban Maine, which by the mid eighties had more than one little African American boy in an entire, decently populated, town. I know there are places in America that still behave the way Maine suburbs would have in 1958 but you wouldn't find them IN Maine in 1985.

So yeah... changing the time line is seriously going to hurt any chance at being 'faithful' to Stephen King's story. A good part of the story had to do with the era of the setting. You might as well update A Christmas Story and set it in 1999. You would seriously effect the way the story is told as well as the setting.

Changing the time line changes the nature of the entire town of Dairy. To claim this version will be closer to King's book is not merely naive. It's a blatant lie.

Needs to be R-rated and at least a two or three part movie (each installment 4 hours) just to make it feel like the source material.

The movie rating was in question? Who was it that didn't think a homicidal clown "creature" targetting children who hides in the sewers didn't warrant the R?

I haven't read the book, but just from reading the differences between the novel and the miniseries it just seems like there's a lot of awkward sexual situations that were left out. Sure the acting was pretty cheesy, but on a whole the miniseries was a really good and an exceptionally scary movie.

I think the only flaw with it is that "IT" turns out to be a giant spider with phosphorescent abs at the end of the movie. But that's a problem with the story itself, not the miniseries.

And that's aside from the fact that Tim Curry's portrayal of Pennywise was just flawless.

It doesn't sound like this remake is going to be closer to the book, but even if it is I would have to mention that the Shining re-make, which was closer to the book, was not nearly as good a movie as the original version which Stephen King hated. And that's because Stanley Kubrick cut out what I think amounted to a lot of plot crap.

To all of you: The ORIGINAL FILM was set in the 80s and had flashbacks to the 50-60s.