Production is currently underway on the two-part, big-screen feature based on Stephen King’s It, and now we have our first look at the story’s most iconic — and terrifying — character, Pennywise the Clown.
The first image of the new Pennywise, as portrayed by Bill Skarsgard, certainly maintains the creepy visual standard set by Tim Curry in the 1990 television miniseries that first brought King’s story to the screen. And according to Skarsgard, the character goes well beyond the typical psychopathic killer.
“It’s such an extreme character. Inhuman,” Skarsgard told Entertainment Weekly, which debuted the image of Pennywise. “It’s beyond even a sociopath, because he’s not even human. He’s not even a clown. I’m playing just one of the beings It creates … It truly enjoys the shape of the clown Pennywise, and enjoys the game and the hunt. What’s funny to this evil entity might not be funny to everyone else. But he thinks it’s funny.”
Set to be directed by Mama filmmaker Andy Muschietti, It tells the story of a group of kids in the town of Derry, Maine, who must overcome their fear in order to battle an evil creature tormenting the town’s youngest, most vulnerable inhabitants. Decades later, they find themselves brought together again when a murderer begins preying on the town’s children once again.
The film will unfold in two feature-length chapters, with the first focusing on the younger versions of the characters, and the second installment following the same characters as adults.
According to Entertainment Weekly, the movie will bring the story forward in time a bit, with the younger versions of the characters having their encounter with Pennywise in the ’80s, and the adult characters taking him on in the current time period. (The events in King’s original novel and the 1990 miniseries were set in the ’50s with the children and ’80s with the adult characters.)
The cast of the first film in the two-part feature includes Skarsgard as Pennywise, along with Jaeden Lieberher (Midnight Special), Finn Wolfhard (Stranger Things), Sophia Lillis, Jack Dylan Grazer (Tales of Halloween), Wyatt Oleff (Guardians of the Galaxy), Chosen Jacobs (Hawaii Five-0), and Jeremy Ray Taylor (42) as the young friends brought together by the terrifying events unfolding in their town.
Stephen King’s It – Part One is scheduled to hit theaters September 8, 2017.
China just gave Hollywood a cautionary tale about AI filmmaking. Sanxingdui: Future Past, billed as the country's first fully AI-generated movie, hit theaters on October 23 and bombed at the box office.
According to Futurism, the film's reported $1.5 million production budget landed on more than 10,000 screens. Yet it pulled in only about $181,000, averaging roughly $20 per screen, making the budget difficult to recover.
Some of the best shots in Grok Imagine’s AI-made Odyssey don’t contain actors. Ancient landscapes stretch into the distance. Close-ups of grimy hands suggest people who have touched something rougher than a keyboard. For a few seconds, the illusion holds.
https://twitter.com/imagine/status/2113712964419063911
YouTube videos could soon look better without eating quite so much data, right? Thankfully, the platform plans to introduce a new video format called AV2 on its web player in early 2027, promising more efficient streaming and potentially fewer playback hiccups on slower internet connections. The big headline is a roughly 30% improvement in compression efficiency over AV1, YouTube's existing video format. That doesn't guarantee every video will use 30% less data, but it could make streaming a little easier on both internet connections and data allowances.
What is AV2, and why should viewers care?