Be aware there areSPOILERSfor IT, IT Chapter TWO and Stephen King’s original novel below.
Stephen King’sITis a beast. A massive horror epic that spans decades, embraces a vast ensemble of characters, details the sprawling history of Derry, Maine, and dips a toe in mind-bending cosmic mythology, the exact details of the novel were never going to make it to the screen, even with two long feature films.
DirectorAndy Muschiettiand screenwriterGary Daubermanhad to do a lot of trimming to transform King’s classic story into a two-part tale – even with a near-three-hour runtime for the second half. WithIT Chapter Twonow in theaters, we’re taking a look at the biggest changes from the book. (If you want to get caught up on thebiggest changes inChapter One, click through for Dave’s comprehensive guide.)
There are an insane amount of detail changes and minor characters who don’t make the cut, and it would be impossibly time-consuming to list them all. Everything from the fact that Richie still wears glasses (he’s had contacts for 20 years in the book) to the fact that the adult Losers can’t have kids, who tells whom they love them on the phone at the end (Richie tells Mike in the book, Mike tells Bill in the movie) to minor gems like the foul-mouthed cab driver who takes Bill to the Jade of the Orient and Beverly’s best friend Kay. There are infinite minor changes, which is what makes the book such a special, immersive treat on its own level.
But in terms of the biggest differences, including new characters, missing key players, and the major changes to the ending, we’ve put together a detailed list of whereIT Chapter Twodiverged from the source material. Check out the book to movie comparison below.
Audra and Tom
InIT Chapter Two, both Bill and Bev have spouses when we meet them, but that’s about the only time either of them come up for the rest of the film. Bill is married to an actress named Audra, who we see on the set of their latest movie (which Bill wrote) having it out over his trouble with endings. As for Bev, she’s married to an abusive man that mirrors her father, a controlling and physically violent man named Tom, who beats the hell out of her when she tries to return to Derry, but ultimately gets left behind when she gets the upper-hand and walks out the door, leaving her wedding ring behind.
In the book, both Tom and Audra have significantly larger roles that take them on journeys to Derry in search of their spouses. Audra heads to Derry out of worry for her husband and Tom beats the information out of Bev’s best friend before following his wife there. Ultimately, their paths bring them together when Pennywise uses Tom to kidnap Audra and bring her to his lair. Once they arrive, Tom drops dead at the sight of Its true form, and It captures Audra in the deadlights. Bill discovers her when the Losers return to the sewers as adults, and after they defeat It, he carries her catatonic body out of the sewers as they crumble. Audra remains unresponsive as Bill returns to his normal life, but in his final scene, Bill has an impulse to take her for a ride on his trusty old bike Silver, riding dangerously and carefree, racing “to beat the devil,” until Audra clutches him, stirring back to life.
Stan Takes a Bath
Poor Stan, RIP. What happens to dear Stanley Uris is the same in both the book and the film – he takes a bath and kills himself – buthowandwhyit happens is very different. At the end ofIT Chapter Two, the surviving Losers receive a letter from Stan that explains why he took his own life. In the film, he explains that he knew he was too scared to face It again with them but he knew that if they didn’t do it together, if even one of them didn’t commit to the fight, that they would lose. So he made the sacrifice play and “took himself off the board” so they could defeat It once and for all. That’s why, when we see him slit his wrists in the beginning of the film, he dies with a contented smile on his face.
In the book, there’s no explanation, no loving note for his wife and friends, and dear Stanley Uris dies with a look of terror on his face. In fact, it’s not just that there’s no note; Stanley’s entire suicide is told from the perspective of his wife Patricia, meaning we don’t get any access to his thought process at all. Just the memories of a woman haunted by her husband’s final moments, which she’ll never understand. Stanley and Patricia are watchingFamily Feudwhen he receives Mike’s call and says he’s going up for a bath – at 7 p.m., which Patricia later realizes he would never normally do. After panicking at the silence and locked door (another thing he would never do) she finds the spare key and, to her horror, discovers Stan’s dead body, “His mouth hung open like a sprung door. His expression was one of abysmal, frozen horror.” In the book, the only note Stan leaves is the word “IT” sloppily scrawled on the wall on his own blood as he was dying.
The Deadlights & Bev’s Visions
We knew the Deadlights were different in the movies sinceChapter One, when Bev got an eyeful but made a full recovery after Ben’s “true love’s kiss” revived her. Well, almost a full recovery. As we see with Audra and Tom, in the novel, the Deadlights are too much for the human mind to take, either killing the person who sees them on sight or leaving them insane and/or catatonic. But Bev recovers quickly with little to no side effects…
UntilChapter Two. At the end of the first film, Bev says she saw a vision of the Losers re-united in the cistern as adults, and in the follow-up expands on that side-effect. Because she looked into the Deadlights, Bev spends the rest of her life with horrible visions she doesn’t understand. Even though she couldn’t remember Derry or anything that happened there, Bev explains to Ben that she had nightmares of their deaths every night. That’s how she knew Stanley killed himself before his wife finished her sentence on the phone. It turns out her nightmares were visions of what would happen to the Losers if they decided, like Stan, not to fight It. And since she’s seen all of them die, that means she knows exactly what horrible fate awaits them if they attempt to leave Derry without finishing the job.
There are plenty of children who meet a bad end in King’s novel, but poor young Dean and his horrible demise are inventions just for the film. InChapter Two, we first meet Dean at the end of the Jade of the Orient scene where he approaches Richie, who mistakes him for one of It’s glamours. But his big moment comes later, when Bill returns to his childhood home and realizes Dean lives there now. After confronting Pennywise through the sewer drain where Georgie died, Bill meets Dean, who tells him he hears voices from the sinks in his house, which sends Bill into a fit, screaming at the young boy to leave town. Naturally, that freaks Dean out and he goes to the Derry Canal Days festival instead.
When Bill heads back to the Derry Town House, It sends him a taunting message via bloody skateboard, asking if he’ll fail Dean the way he failed Georgie. Bill takes off for the festival, following Dean into a Hall of Mirrors, but he’s too late. Separated by a pane of glass, Bill is forced to watch while Pennywise terrifies and eats the young boy, mentally tormenting Bill using Dean as a Georgie surrogate. In pre-release interviews,James McAvoyrecalled how the scene was invented. “We were missing a vital story beat for Bill where he dealt with his guilt that he caused his brother’s death," he explained. “I said to Andy, “What can we do?’…and literally in 50 minutes, he invented a whole new sequence. It was never in the script, and it isn’t in the book.”
A Visit to Mrs. Kersh
Muschietti keeps a lot of King’s original creation in the chilling scene where Beverly returns to her childhood apartment, including the moment when she misreads “Kersh” for “Marsh” and some exact lines of dialogue. However, as with much of King’s novel, what happens in the book is much weirder and more disturbing.
The set-up is the same: Bev returns to her apartment and meets a kindly old lady who tells Bev her father is dead and offers her some tea. In the film, Bev slowly starts to notice some decay and strangeness until the lady transforms into a trollish giant who comes charging at her. However, in the book, Mrs. Kersh’s transformation is slower and more bizarre.
First, her beautiful hair grows straggly, her skin turns sallow, and her teeth appear crooked, then her garments change and her accent, as she tells Beverly about her father Bob Gray, aka Pennywise the Dancing Clown. Gnawing at sweets, the old woman eventually transforms into the witch from ‘Hansel and Gretel’, threatening to throw Bev and her friends in the oven, and then becomes Bev’s father. He shouts horrid, lurid profanities at her, describing how he beat her because he wanted to have sex with her (let’s just say It doesn’t put it as tactfully,) until he transforms into a clown holding balloons that read “It came from outer space” and chases her out of the apartment in terror.
The Smoke-Hole
We’re getting into the real weird stuff now, and the pieces of King’s novel that presented the biggest challenges when it came to coherent depictions on-screen. One of the wiser moments to get the ax/update, is the book’s smoke-hole scene, which lets Mike and Richie see how It arrived on Earth and has that very distinct 1980s problematic flavor.
In the book, the Losers get the idea for a smoke hole from Ben, who reads about them in a history book about Native American tribes and how they would use the smoke from green wood to provoke visions. Thanks to Ben’s recently constructed underground clubhouse, they have the perfect place to try it for themselves, making Richie wonder if there isn’t some bigger plan to the design of their lives. That hunch gets a little more credence when they attempt to draw a lit match to decide who will stay out of danger and keep watch, only to find that somehow all the matches are still brand new. They have to do it together.
All seven go down in the smoke-hole, but only Richie and Mike last long enough for the vision. They travel back to what they call “Ago” – a prehistoric land where Derry would later be, filled with lush wildlife and creatures lost to history, that may have been a million, or ten million, or tens of millions of years ago. There, they watch It crash-land to Earth from space. Richie says it “sounded like the end of the world” and says it wasn’t like a space ship or a meteor, but like the Ark of the Covenant, except instead of the spirit of God, it brought It. It landed in the ground that would eventually become Derry, and this is how the Losers learn that It has always been there, that ItisDerry.
Muschietti updated this for the film, dropping the information in the adult section of the story when Mike drugs Bill with a root he was given by a Native American tribe that lives just outside of Derry – and just outside of Its reach. As the only Loser who stayed in Derry and the only Loser that remembered, Mike spent his life dedicated to researching It and trying to find a way to kill it. When he found the tribe, they gave him a vision of how It came to earth – very much like what he and Richie saw in the book. In the film, we experience it through Bill’s hallucinogenic trip, an animated style sequence that shows It landing on Earth and devastating the native civilizations that came before Derry. And that same hallucination leads us to our next major deviation…
The Ritual of Chüd
Where to begin with the Ritual of Chüd, one of King’s most batshit inventions in his massive resume? In the film, we learn about the ritual during the same scene that we see It arrive on Earth, Bill’s hallucinatory vision sequence. As depicted inChapter Two, the Ritual of Chüd requires the Losers to collect totems of their forgotten memories from Derry to sacrifice in a ritual that will supposedly trap Pennywise in an ancient vase. This is what sends the Losers back to their old haunting grounds in search of the memories they’ve forgotten and the totems that represent them (in the book, they go wandering to get their memories and tap into their childhood sense of intuition).
In the end, Beverly brings her “Winter Fire” poem from Ben, Ben brings his signed yearbook page from Bev, Bill brings the paper boat he made with Georgie, Eddie brings his inhaler, Richie brings an arcade token tied to a traumatic moment in his childhood (see below), Mike brings a rock from their rock war against the Bowers gang, and for Stan, they bring the shower cap he used to keep spiders out of his hair in the clubhouse. They sacrifice their artifacts, they chant “turn light into dark”, the deadlights shrink and swirl into the container… and it doesn’t work.
In our interview with Muschietti, the filmmaker explained,
“It doesn’t really work. But [Mike] knows that the only way to defeat Pennywise is using the power of unified belief and this is the McGuffin that he decides to use…There is nothing that can kill Pennywise. The only weapon is believing, which is a weapon that actually Pennywise uses to kill his victims."
In the book, the Ritual of Chüd also doesn’t kill It, but it is an instrumental weapon in the Losers Club’s battle against the creature. And here’s where we board a non-stop train to Crazytown. The Ritual is brought to them by Maturin, the Turtle god, a mostly benevolent if often indifferent celestial creature, who accidentally created our known universe during a fit of indigestion. He’s as powerful as It, a sort of anti-Pennywise, who mostly stays out of human affairs but sometimes lends some guidance. That’s what he does with Bill and the Losers, who share some inexplicable knowledge of the Turtle.
Back to the Ritual of Chüd. This happens twice for the Losers in the novel, once when they’re kids and once as adults. The ritual itself involves the two parties “biting” on each other’s tongues and telling jokes until one of them laughs and the other wins. That’s not quite how it plays out, but that’s the general idea – a battle of wills waged in the Macroverse, fought with the power of belief. As the novel says, “once you get into cosmological shit like this, you got to throw away the instruction manual.”
In the first ritual, Bill travels through cosmic space towards the Macroverse, where he meets the Turtle and has a vague conversation. He fights his battle of the wills by chanting the tongue-twister he uses to help with his stutter (he thrust his fists against the posts and still insists he sees the ghosts) and ultimately wins by channeling all his belief in good things like the tooth fairy, Santa Claus, and the promise that the police will help children in need. At the time, Bill believes the ritual killed It. Of course, he’s wrong.
During the second ritual, Bill is once again pulled out towards the Macroverse, where he sees the dead shell of the Turtle and feels certain defeat coming their way. The first time they caught It by surprise, but not this time. Fortunately, Richie has some surprises of his own and jumps in on the ritual with Bill, traveling out into the void and saving Bill from going over the edge into nothingness. Even still, it’s not enough, until Eddie senses their peril and gives his life in a brave act that saves them all.
(For more, check out our fullRitual of Chüd explainerwith the filmmakers.)
Eddie’s Death
Poor Edds. No matter which version of IT you dive into, you’re going to have to say goodbye to dear Eddie Kaspbrak, but the events are slightly different. In the film, Eddie sacrifices his beloved childhood inhaler in the Ritual of Chud, but he still comes with the sacrifice play at just the right moment. Using the fire poker Beverly gave him (“It kills monsters… if you believe it does”) Eddie hurls the weapon into Its mouth, saving Richie from the deadlights. But that doesn’t kill the monster. When Eddie’s back is turned, the Pennywise-spider impales him with one of his claws, and Eddie bleeds out while the rest of the Losers fight the final battle against It. In a humorous spin on his final encounter with Richie, Eddie says he has a confession and then tells Richie, “I fucked your mother.”
In the book, Eddie’s death hits even harder. Richie and Bill are locked in their telepathic battle with It during the Ritual of Chud, but Eddie hears Richie’s cries that they’re losing. Summoning all his childhood belief in the his inhaler, his belief in the “good medicine, strong medicine” his mother gave him before he knew it was a placebo, Eddie fires his aspirator down Its throat and severely injures It. He also loses his arm in the process. Lying in Beverly’s lap, Eddie quickly bleeds out. Richie comes to first and goes to his old friend. Eddie thinks to himself, “‘This is not bad at all.’ But there was something else he had to say first.” But he never gets to say it. Speaking to Richie, Eddie says, “You know, I… I…” King ends Eddie’s journey, “Eddie closed his eyes, thinking how to finish, and while he was still thinking it over, he died.”
In both versions, Richie is utterly devastated by his friend’s death, even more so when he realizes they have to leave Eddie’s body behind in the crumbling caverns.
Richie’s Big Secret
Richie and Eddie’s sexuality have long been a point of conversation for book readers, sparking a dedicated “Reddie” fandom and some fascinating discussions about the details in King’s book. The truth is, King gives no firm answers one way or the other. In one of his adult chapters, Richie alludes to a long sexual history with women, noting how lucky it is none of them got pregnant (a nod to the Losers' inability have children). As for Eddie, he marries the spitting image of his mother, an overweight overbearing woman who coddles and cages him.
From Eddie’s Freudian nightmare marriage to Richie’s tendency to call Edds “cute, cute, cute” to the fact that Eddie – known germaphobe – was willing to share Richie’s Rocket chocolate, and most of all Richie and Eddie’s final interaction and Richie’s profound reaction to Eddie’s death, there are lots of little moments in the book that have stoked the fires of conversation over the years, but the book never makes anything plain one way or another.
IT Chapter Two, however, makes a bold stroke of adaptation and builds Richie’s arc and childhood trauma around the fact that he is gay, was in love with his childhood BFF Eddie Kaspbrak, and has spent his life repressing his trauma and his identity. In the film, Richie’s endless parade of sexual humor acts as a mask to hide his true identity and his wise-cracking friendship with Eddie masks his true feelings.
We learn Richie’s truth when he returns to the arcade he frequented as a kid and remembers a time he visited during his “break-up” with the Losers and played an arcade game with Henry Bowers' cousin. The two share a nice moment and when Richie asks his new friend not to leave, passing him another arcade token, their hands brush. But then the Bowers Gang arrives, slinging homophobic slurs at Richie and he escapes to the park, where he’s tormented by the Paul Bunyan statue (a striking image of conventional masculinity on attack). Sitting in the park as an adult, Richie encounters Pennywise, who taunts him, “I know your secret, your dirty little secret.”
In the end, Richie never has the chance to express his feelings to Eddie, who dies in the final confrontation with Pennywise. But the Losers rally around him in his grief, and before he leaves town, we see Richie return to the Kissing Bridge, where he re-carves the same initials he did as a child: R + E.
(For more on Richie’s arc in Chapter Two,check out our interview with Bill Hader.)
Henry Bowers
The films do a pretty good job of squeezing in the broad strokes of Henry Bowers' journey – a bully who takes after his abusive father and ultimately becomes Its violent pawn in the fight against the Losers Club – but in King’s book, Bowers is a true secondary antagonist. Troubled and terrifying, King’s version of the character comes with pages and pages of details on his psychological breakdown and how It pushed the volatile young boy over the breaking point into murderous madness.
In the book, Henry’s father, Butch Bowers, is an ex-marine who is said to have gone crazy when he was discharged from the war and who spent his years after beating his wife until she left him, then turning his full attention on his son. A virulent racist, Butch passed his hatred on to Henry, who grew up despising Mike. When they were both children, Henry poisoned Mike’s dog. When he told his father, it was the first time he felt approval – Butch gave his son a beer and a toast to a “job well done”.
After the Losers' first battle with Pennywise, It framed Henry to take the fall for all the child murders and he was sent to a mental institution for 27 years…. until It returns, and starts beckoning Henry back to Derry to get vengeance on the Losers he hates so much. First, It communicates with Henry as the moon, or as Henry calls it, the ghost-moon, whispering to him in the voices of his dead childhood friends. When it comes time for Henry’s escape, It comes to him in the form of his old friend Vic (in the film, it’s Patrick Hockstetter) and sends Henry on a mission of murder, explaining that It can only kill them if they half-believe, but Henry can kill them no matter what.
Henry attacks Mike in the library and sends him to the hospital, taking out a key player in the Ritual of Chüd and the power of the Losers' shared belief, but fails to kill him. After that, he attacks Eddie at the Town House, where Eddie manages to get the upper hand and kills him with a broken bottle. In the film, the events are reversed – Henry attacks Eddie at the Town House, stabbing him in the face but failing to kill him, before targeting Mike at the library, where Henry is killed by Richie.
