It shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise that Andrés Muschietti’s adaptation of Stephen King’s horror novel It will be rated R. There aren’t many King adaptations that turn out PG-13, and the reason is that there’s really no upside. The amount of teenager viewers you could draw in is negated by the fans of the book you’ll lose who know that to do the novel justice, you’ll have to give it an R rating. Also, we know that “R” isn’t necessarily a death knell for a movie, especially if it has a reasonable budget (and no one expects a film based on It to cost the same as a superhero blockbuster).

Steve Weintraub recently spoke to producer Dan Lin at the press day for The LEGO Batman Movie, and Lin confirmed that It, which he’s also producing, is going to be rated R:

While Lin didn’t go into detail on whether or not this was a “Hard-R”, I think it’s reasonable to expect that this isn’t just going to be a PG-13 movie with a few F-bombs dropped in. It’s going to be scary, it’s probably going to be a little gory, and that’s what everyone expects to see.

Fans of the book also know that the clown terrorizing kids is only half the story. The second half of the book follows the kids as adults, and Lin confirms that their plan is to make a sequel about the adults assuming the first movie is a success.

Check out the video above. It opens September 8th. Look for more from Steve’s interview with Dan Lin soon.

“It” doesn’t hit theaters for another six months, but at least one person has seen it: Stephen King. The oft-adapted horror writer, whose 1986 novel was previously turned into a miniseries starring Tim Curry as Pennywise the Clown, is said to have watched — and, crucially, enjoyed — the upcoming film version directed by Andrés Muschietti.

“Steve asked me to pass along that he saw a screening of IT today and wanted to let everybody know that they should stop worrying about it as the producers have done a wonderful job with the production,” reads a message posed to Instagram by “It” producer Seth Grahame-Smith, who wrote “Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.”

This new adaptation hasn’t had the smoothest of productions, as its development dates back to 2009 and original co-writer/director Cary Fukunaga (“True Detective”) departed the project in 2015.

King hasn’t always been happy with adaptations of his novels, most famously “The Shining” — he’s called Stanley Kubrick a man who “thinks too much and feels too little.” Bill Skarsgĺrd, Jaeden Lieberher, Jeremy Ray Taylor, Sophia Lillis and Finn Wolfhard star in “It,” which is scheduled for release on September 8.