Next year’s highly anticipated It: Chapter Two will feature a same-sex couple, and they will be played by openly gay actors. But there’s something of an asterisk.
(be warned: SPOILERS for It: Chapter Two ahead)
Yes, Andy Muschietti’s follow-up to the 2017 phenomenon, the highest-grossing horror movie of all time if not accounting for inflation, will feature a gay couple. But if the movie is anything like the book—and considering the slavishly faithful first film didn’t really change any plot elements it did not altogether omit, it damn likely will be—they don’t get a happy ending. At all.
According to Deadline, Actor/director Xavier Dolan (he directed Adele’s “Hello” video) and Gossip Girl hottie Taylor Frey have joined Chapter Two as Adrian Mellon and Don Hagarty, respectively. In Stephen King’s book, Mellon and Hagarty are life partners who are walking home from Derry, Maine’s town fair when they are harassed and assaulted by three homophobic teens. The teens throw Mellon from a bridge and continue to beat up Hagarty before the police eventually intervene. In the water below, Mellon is killed by Pennywise the clown, who bites his armpits and cracks his ribs.
LGBTQ+ representation in Hollywood films is embarrassingly low right now. Even though this is a dark disturbing plot thread, perhaps Muschietti and Warner Bros. can turn it into something memorable. After all, a ton of people are going to see this thing.
The first movie grossed $700.4 million internationally.
Filming of It: Chapter Two starts later this month. Cast members Jessica Chastain and James McAvoy have already made their presence on set known via social media.
It must be noted, and anyone who’s read King’s book knows this, that the 2017 film toned down the [admittedly disturbing] sexual content of the novel in a major way. Young Beverly’s sexual abuse was only vaguely hinted at, a sex act between two young male town bullies was removed, as was a moment where Pennywise chases after one of the boys in The Losers’ Club asking to “blow him.”
Also omitted from the film, thank God, was the graphic preteen orgy that ends Act I, something that should have never existed in the book and one hopes—HOPES— can be attributed to the hard drugs King was possibly using at the time.
From Warner Bros. Pictures, It: Chapter Two opens September 6, 2019.
h/t: Pink News
I feel like I read a totally
I feel like I read a totally different book. Sexual assault with Beverly, two bullies having sex? And what is wrong the 'Blow me" , that would fit. Preteen Orgy? Oh come on please. I think you read between the lines a lot. You really make the book sound like it is filth. Life happens (apart from the spiders of course)