After a dismal Summer for Hollywood, wherein audience attendance dropped, Stranger Things. Echoes of King's work are all over the 80s set supernatural drama, but IT is especially influential in its execution, and now, one month before season 2 premieres, the cycle is complete. That's not to say there's a direct link between Stranger Things' success and IT's major box office numbers, but the show played heavily on a hunger for that brand of nostalgia and certainly kept the memories of Pennywise and the Losers Club fresh in audiences' minds. We wouldn't be surprised if Muschietti sent the Duffer Brothers a thank you gift basket for their contributions.
IT was given two great marketing campaigns one from a savvy studio and the other an unintentional promotion at the hands of pranksters. New Line's own work included some simple but attention-grabbing work with those iconic red balloons as well as hugely effective trailers that instantly went viral. The first official trailer for the movie ended up being viewed over 200m times worldwide in 24 hours. As for the accidental promo, 2016 saw an unnerving trend of clown appearances and attacks across the world, seemingly for no reason and with no organized plan behind it. This also went viral and had many joking that it was just new Line going overboard with the IT promo, something they denied. Still, it certainly got people thinking about the film many months before it premiered.
It is also an outlier in of modern Hollywood horror. While the indie scene has exploded with fascinating, experimental and genre-melding horror for the past few years from The Babadook to The Witch to It Comes at Night for the major studios, the genre is considered a mere frivolity to pad out Halloween release schedules and not something to put any real budget into. This ignores how profitable the genre has always been, particularly to New Line Cinema. It was thanks to the meteoric success of Wes Craven's A Nightmare on Elm Street, released in 1984 and followed by a succession of sequels, that helped save them from financial ruin. Their nickname is still "The House That Freddie Built".
Now, it seems that IT will repeat that success, which only goes to show that audiences have and always will hunger for horror, particularly if it's got a decent budget behind it. $35m is a solidly medium budget but it's practically blockbuster numbers for horror, which thrives on micro-budgeting. With something like IT, more money was a necessity to cover effects work, but it also signalled a desire to treat a major property in the genre with the care and attention it deserved. Audiences probably wouldn't have turned out in droves like they have if IT had been made on the cheap.
Rotten Tomatoes once again took a beating from the major studios this Summer, as various sources tried to blame the site for low turnout and underperforming films. While we're pretty sure it's still impossible for a review aggregate site to wield all-consuming control over the entertainment industry, the critics do still have some power, as IT can attest. Not only did it sur financial expectations, it totally smashed critical ones, and currently sits with a delightfully fresh 88% on Rotten Tomatoes (its Metacritic score is an equally impressive 71). This follows on from an oft-overlooked trend of the dismal Summer critical acclaim and good word of mouth helped to bolster the financial state of various smaller movies, like Baby Driver, which grossed over $200m from a budget comparative to that of IT.
It remains to be seen how far IT can carry this success. The sequel is already being planned set to follow the other half of the novel where the Losers Club return to Derry as adults to battle Pennywise and the international box office numbers could help push this into one of the most successful films of the year. That's certainly a boost of confidence to New Line Cinema as well as horror at large. If nothing else, it's a reminder that sometimes, there's nothing more effective for business than scaring the hell out of your customers.
