It looks like there was at least one person who got out of swearing that if it wasn’t dead he would come back. Despite spending more than a year developing a two-film adaptation of Stephen King’s It, director Cary Fukunaga has decided he doesn’t want to do battle with a timeless, monstrous entity that feeds off children (also known as New Line Cinema). Deadline reports the director has left the project, meaning someone else will now have to shepherd that younger, sexier Pennywise through the paces of murdering kids.
Though no official reason was given, Fukunaga reportedly left over clashes with the studio based on budget and the creative differences said budget would entail. More specifically, New Line wanted to make sure that Fukunaga’s creativity stuck to a $30 million budget. However, submitted scripts supposedly necessitated much higher costs; a final script hasn’t even been approved yet, even though shooting is scheduled to start next month. Fukunaga probably quit right around the time that New Line held up a cardboard cut-out of Harry Anderson and proposed that it play the part of Richie, reasoning that anyone born in the ’90s wouldn’t know the difference.