Last month, True Detective director Cary Fukunaga sounded positively giddy as he told a Tribeca Film Festival audience, “I’m eight weeks away from starting Stephen King’s It.” He’d been working on the project since 2012, before the first season of the HBO series made him a cinephile superstar, and his plan to adapt King’s monster novel into a two-part film have always seemed ambitious. And it seems it was a bit too ambitious for New Line, causing the director to walk off the project a scant three weeks before the start of production.
The Wrap reports Fukunaga clashed with the studio over (you might wanna sit down for this shocker) money, with New Line recently demanding cuts to the picture’s budget. The clash came to a head over Memorial Day weekend, when, a source told The Wrap, New Line got “cold feet about the project in the wake of the less-than-stellar opening of Poltergeist, which featured a clown in its marketing materials.” And there you have it, the most depressingly on-target thing about Hollywood you’ll read all day.
Unsurprisingly, New Line will not try to make Fukunaga’s summer start date with a different director, instead opting to push the project “indefinitely.”
