Now, this news? This news makes us happy. Our friends over at Collider recently sat down with producer Roy Lee, who confirmed plans to shoot Stephen King’s It later this year as an R-rated film.

“It will hopefully be shooting later this year. We just got the California tax credit… Gary Doberman wrote the most recent draft working with [director] Andy Muscetti, so it’s being envisioned as two movies. It is very close to the source material in one way but very different if you look at it as a literary piece of work. We’re taking it and making the movie from the point of view of the kids, and then making another movie from the point of view of the adults that could potentially then be cut together like the novel. But it’s gonna be a really fun way of making this movie.”

As for the film’s rating, Lee confirms it will be rated R and adds that while they have a final draft, they’re currently fine-tuning the script to hit their budget target. The rating comes as seriously welcome news as the success of Deadpool has made the R rating less of a taboo for Hollywood. At least for now.

“We are very close to turning in the final draft of the script. It’s mainly working on it for budgeting purposes to make it fit within the budget that we have.”

Book Synopsis:

It began for the Losers on a day in June of 1958, the day school let out for the summer. That was the day Henry Bowers carved the first letter of his name on Ben Hanscom’s belly and chased him into the Barrens, the day Henry and his Neanderthal friends beat up on Stuttering Bill Denbrough and Eddie Kaspbrak, the day Stuttering Bill had to save Eddie from his worst asthma attack ever by riding his bike to beat the devil. It ended in August, with seven desperate children in search of a creature of unspeakable evil in the drains beneath Derry. In search of It. And somehow it ended.

Or so they thought. Then.

On a spring night in 1985, Mike Hanlon, once one of those children, makes six calls. Stan Uris, accountant. Richie “Records” Tozier, L.A. disc jockey. Ben Hanscom, renowned architect. Beverly Rogan, dress designer. Eddie Kaspbrak, owner of a successful New York limousine company. And Bill Denbrough, bestselling writer of horror novels. Bill Denbrough, who now only stutters in his dreams.

These six men and one woman have forgotten their childhoods, have forgotten the time when they were Losers… but an unremembered promise draws them back, the present begins to rhyme dreadfully with the past, and when the Losers reunite, the wheels of fate lock together and roll them toward the ultimate terror.