'It Chapter Two' Has A 2 Hour 45 Minute Runtime; Plus Director's Cut Coming Too

What happens when you take an old horror movie, turn it into a $700 million worldwide surprise smash and launch a franchise? You get leeway, that’s what. “It” director Andy Muschietti has confirmed the rumored, epic runtime of “It Chapter Two” and it’s long, two hours and forty-five minutes long—essentially as long as “Avengers: Infinity War” was to compare to a recent blockbuster of that length.

“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 said at a junket captured by Digital Spy. “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 realize that some of the events and some of the beats can be easily lifted, but the essence of the story remains intact.”

Muschietti obviously has an epic story to tell. And it’s one that tells two eras, one of the kids of the original and the grown-up Losers Club members played by folks like Jessica Chastain (who starred in Muschietti’s “Mama” horror), James McAvoy, Bill Hader, James Ransome and more. But the director acknowledged that film, while long, can’t be that long.

“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.”

But it sounds like Muschietti does like his four-hour cut and the filmmaker revealed that beyond a 2 hour 45-minute cut, a director’s cut would eventually be released too, probably on the DVD. Producer Barbara Muschietti said, we’ll all eventually see some of the missing scenes. “We have some amazing scenes that didn’t make it into the movie,” she said. “You have to make choices sometimes, and some things cannot be in this theatrical release but are definitely worthy of people seeing them at a later date.”

It’s all an incredibly bold move, but audiences went ape for the newest trailer, so Warner Bros. obviously hopes it all pays off. “It Chapter Two” haunts theaters September 6, 2019, and we’ll find out then.