IT The Highest Grossing R-Rated Horror Movie with $123,403,419

How IT Became the Monster Hit That No One Saw Coming

As many of you know, IT is a monster. The highly anticipated adaptation busted all expectations and broke a slew of records for the Fall, R-Rated movies, and horror movies in general. Almost everyone (sans that one guy on this page who predicted it whom I applaud) never saw this coming. The real question now is, how did IT pull this off? Well, to figure this out, let’s start in the beginning at…

#1. The 1990 Mini-series

Back in 1990, Tim Curry scared the world as Pennywise in the hugely watched television mini-series. The key is that those who watched it and were scared were about 10-15 years old. Now, 27 years later, those kids, who believed that the mini-series was one of the most horrifying things ever, are now close to 40 years old. Usually, horror films are not directed as much towards this group, but with this new nostalgia revival, the 1990 mini-series really helped bring in the older demographic. Along with nostalgia, some of the scenes are just iconic. From personal experience, I have seen parts of IT before I actually knew exactly what IT was. There were countless memes of Georgie looking the sewer, or the scene of Pennywise in the shower that I somehow found on Youtube. Without really knowing it, I already knew of IT. So, the movie was announced, it went into production, and then we got…

#2. The First Trailer

The 1st trailer released back in March became the most watched trailer in 24 hours. More than Star Wars, Fast & the Furious, and Beauty & the Beast. This was the first sign. The trailer revealed a glimpse at the famous Georgie sewer scene, many scares, and a hint at the clown. The trailer delivered satisfaction, scares, and an overall mystery. While many people watched the trailer, they didn’t all have to see the movie. The next reason why they did was because of…

#3. Great Marketing

As I said, a ton of people watched the first trailer, but that doesn’t mean they had to watch the movie when it came out. Here’s the twist, the marketing kept them in. The first trailer, along with sneak peeks, posters, commercials, more trailers had great elements. The image of Georgie in a yellow coat, the red balloon, “You’ll Float Too!”, the creative kids TV show, sneaking more and more of Pennywise, and the overall mystery of the movie kept fans and casual moviegoers continuously aware and intrigued in the movie. Personally, this was probably the best element. While these factors were fantastic, I think the movie was also helped by…

#4. Reaching a ton of demographics

At the surface, IT seems like it’s just an average horror movie, but it was able to reach out and get a lot more people. Of course, you have the horror demographic. This includes 17-24-year-olds mainly. Next, as stated, you have the 40ish-year-olds who grew up on the 1990 mini-series who wanted to reexperience their fears. Along with that, you also have the thousands of fans of the Stephen King novel, which is considered to be one of his best, who wanted to see a well-budgeted version of the book. One of the more important demographics is the young audience. With the main characters being kids, young teens, 11-16, want to see people like themselves up on the big screen. Along with that, the R-Rated element made them want to see it even more. It worked very well for Deadpool, and it worked well for IT. While these elements were managed by Warner Brothers, one biggie was…

#5. The dry Summer

IT got really lucky. We all know that this wasn’t the best Summer ever. We have not had a huge movie since mid-July, and the last “big-ish” movie was another horror film, Annabelle: Creation. August was awful with bomb after bomb. Because of that, audiences were craving something big and new. Being the first biggie of the fall season, people looked towards the cinema and saw IT. Now, people were already hyped, audiences needed a new film, and the only last remaining beneficial factor was…

#6. Great Reviews

Even though no reviews for the film came out only until 2 days before it was released, they were great. Not just great, fantastic! The movie received an 87% on RottenTomatoes, and in this age of “rottentomatoes controls moviegoers”, it definitely helped. This last element helped persuade those who were unsure of the movie, and those in other demographics who would just want to see a well-received movie.

So with the help of nostalgia, great marketing, a slew of movie bombs, and great reviews, IT kept on defying expectations to eventually become one of the biggest box office surprises of the decade, up there with Get Out. I don’t know where IT is going to end up, but what we do know is that it’ll end big.

What do you guys think? Am I missing any points? did you see this coming? Whatever you guys think, you can comment below. And, if you’re still reading at this point, thank you so much!