It Floats All The Way To Record $13.5 Million Thursday; Scribe Addresses The Book’s Controversial Sex Scene

It’s the year of 1988 and the quaint town of Derry, Maine is about to welcome an uninvited guest into its midst.

We are, of course, referring to Pennywise, Stephen King’s horrific abomination that’s able to contort and change its appearance depending on the hapless victim at hand. For The Losers Club, those primal fears manifest themselves in the form of abusive parents, runaway siblings, and over-friendly clowns from the 19th century. Talk about nightmare fuel.

And if there was ever any doubt that New Line and Andy Muschietti’s It reboot was bound for success, data compiled by PostTrak has confirmed that, yes, the budding horror hit of 2017 is well on its way to becoming a box office monster.

Thanks to all that pent-up demand, It collected a record $13.5 million from Thursday screenings, which is the third-largest sum for 2017 in North America – only Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 ($17 million) and Disney’s Beauty and the Beast ($16.3 million) scored higher. And as if that wasn’t impressive enough, $13.5 million is also the biggest haul for “a horror movie, for an R-rated title, for a September release, and for a film based on a Stephen King book,” who gave his blessing for all of the minor plot changes made during the transition from book to screen.

Speaking of which, one of the film’s writers, Gary Dauberman, touched base on the controversial sex scene from King’s novel. Without straying into spoiler territory, it involved Beverly Marsh and the rest of the Losers towards the end of the book, though Dauberman believes it didn’t fit in the story Andy Muschietti and Co. wanted to tell.

Per EW:

Besides Georgie in the sewer [the It opening], I think it’s the one scene that everybody kind of brings up and it’s such a shame. While it’s an important scene, it doesn’t define the book in any way I don’t think and it shouldn’t. We know what the intent was of that scene and why he put it in there, and we tried to accomplish what the intent was in a different way.

And though Pennywise was effectively banished at the tail-end of Andy Muschietti’s reboot, slipping back into the depths of the sewers once the Losers overcame their crippling fears, Warner Bros. and New Line have gone ahead and issued the go-ahead for It: Chapter 2. A 2019 release is said to be the target, while it’ll be interesting to watch how high It climbs (floats?) at the weekend box office. Suddenly that $75 million ceiling doesn’t look so far out of reach.