'It: Chapter Two' Will Be Nearly Three Hours Long

We hope moviegoers like the Losers' Club because they're going to spend quite a bit of time with them when It: Chapter Two premieres in September. Director Andy Muschietti confirmed in an interview with Digital Spy that the back half of his Stephen King adaptation will run just 15 minutes shy of three hours.

Surprisingly, the director said that his original cut was much longer. However, he made the wise decision to cut it back for the audience's sake.

"At the beginning, when you're writing and building the beats of the story, everything that you put in there seems very essential to the story," he said. "However, when you have the movie finally edited and it's 4 hours long, you realize that some of the events and some of the beats can be easily lifted but the essence of the story remains intact."

He said that he feels the final product zips along for a movie of such considerable length.

"You cannot deliver a 4-hour movie because people will start to feel uncomfortable – no matter what they see – but we ended up having a movie that is 2 hours and 45 minutes, and the pacing is very good, he said. "Nobody who's seen the movie has had any complaint."

Producer Barbara Muschietti said that the original cut of the movie will see the light of day when it's time to release it to home video.

"We will put out a director's cut because this time it definitely merits it," she said.