Beep Beep, Richie: ‘It’ Trailer Breaks Record for Most Views in a Single Day
For more than three months, The Fate of the Furious held the top spot of the movie trailer X-Games, accruing 139 million views in 24 hours, promptly dethroning Beauty and the Beast. But now a new player has entered the game, and he comes bearing a red balloon and a mouthful of shiny, sharp teeth. Beep beep, Vinnie.
Variety reports that this year’s It is now king, with 197 million online views a day after its release. That’s almost 60 million more than The Fate of the Furious, which is kind of a shockingly huge difference. F8 only beat Beauty and the Beast by 10 million. Looks like people love watching kids scream and run away from scary clowns.
It’s actually very easy to understand how this happened. On a purely aesthetic level, it’s the simplest thing in the world to compare the look of It to that of last year’s runaway hit series Stranger Things (mostly because the show borrows liberally from Stephen King’s novel). The kids (Finn Wolfhard is in both), the clothes, the dim color scheme — even folks who haven’t read the book or seen the miniseries could enjoy it. It’s that ’80s nostalgia baby! And a little bit of behind-the-scenes trivia: Chung Chung-hoon, the cinematographer behind such aesthetically gorgeous Park Chan-wook films as Oldboy, Stoker, and last year’s The Handmaiden, is the director of photography behind the camera for It as well. He’s the reason it looks as misty and green and atmospheric as it does.
For another thing, it’s just a darn good trailer. We’ve spent months throwing jabs at all the promotional Pennywise photos (including the one at the top of this article), and sure, you can make fun of that ruffly Renaissance-inspired collar all you want, but man, when it all comes down to it, we were kind of flabbergasted at how great this movie looks. That is one scary clown.
It hits theaters September 8.