Stephen King's IT: What The Ending Really Means

7. What We Didn't See

There are lots of things in the new adaptation that are different to Stephen King's original text - and indeed the mini-series from 1990. The most notable - the lack of any of the stranger mythology of King's text - comes down to director Andres Muschietti's decision to focus more tightly on the kids' stories, as he told Yahoo Movies:

“I really wanted to focus on the emotional journey of the group of kids. Getting in to that other dimension - the other side - was something that we could introduce in the second part. In the book the perspective of the writing… is always with the Losers, so everything they know about Pennywise is very speculative and shrouded in absurdity, so I wanted to respect that mystery feeling of not knowing what’s on the other side."

In the novel particularly, we see much more of Pennywise's backstory revealed, as the Losers Club go on an extra-dimensional journey and encounter the god-like turtle Maturin (who appears in LEGO form in the film) who allows the kids to delve into Pennywise’s brain through “The Ritual of Chüd.” Yeah, strange.

We might not have seen any of that - or the reveal of Pennywise's "true" form that so horribly derailed the 1990 adaptation - but, according to Muschietti does say we'll see more in the sequel:

“I also wanted to leave something for the second half, so I didn’t want to get in trouble with that - going into the macroverse or that transdimensional stuff - and keep it grounded, from the point of view of the kids. There’s another movie to expand into that. Also, there’s a physical truth that it’s a movie that has a budget. And I didn’t want to get into a depiction of a realm that f*cks up our budget, the creation of a world that will basically suck up half of our budget, and would have to sacrifice a lot of things.”