Here’s the reason why Cary Fukunaga left Stephen King’s IT reboot.
Cary Fukunaga previously touched on some of the reasons why he stepped away from the highly anticipated reboot of Stephen King’s It, saying he and New Line Pictures “just wanted to make different movies.” Now, in an interview with Variety, he shares some more details on exactly what kind of movie New Line wanted to make:
“I was trying to make an unconventional horror film. It didn’t fit into the algorithm of what they knew they could spend and make money back on based on not offending their standard genre audience. Our budget was perfectly fine. We were always hovering at the $32 million mark, which was their budget. It was the creative that we were really battling. It was two movies. They didn’t care about that. In the first movie, what I was trying to do was an elevated horror film with actual characters. They didn’t want any characters. They wanted archetypes and scares. I wrote the script. They wanted me to make a much more inoffensive, conventional script. But I don’t think you can do proper Stephen King and make it inoffensive.” [via Variety]
Fukunaga took it to the next level by describing how the studio sent and endless list of changes. While rejecting everything he and his script co-writer Chase Palmer put forward. there were apparently no major arguments, just the two filmmakers having their vision destroyed. Fukunaga decided he would rather leave the movie than be “micro-managed all the way through production.”
Now New Line Cinema is working on a new script, which is supposedly a big relief for the director who said his “biggest fear was they were going to take our script and bastardize it.”
Not exactly a major endorsement of New Line Cinema’s It reboot.