IT Box Office: Totals for Both Films

The IT box office totals $1.19 billion worldwide across two films, according to Box Office Mojo, with $540.5 million earned domestically and the rest abroad. Budgets and grosses in the table are from the same source.

The worldwide column is the figure each film reports, so the domestic and international columns can differ from it by a few hundred dollars. The combined row is the sum of the two worldwide totals.

It (2017), directed by Andy Muschietti, opened in the United States on September 8, 2017, and ran 135 minutes. Bill Skarsgård played Pennywise, and the seven young Losers Club members, led by Jaeden Martell as Bill Denbrough, carried the story. It Chapter Two (2019), also directed by Muschietti, arrived in the United States on September 6, 2019, and ran 169 minutes with Jessica Chastain, James McAvoy and Bill Hader leading the adult cast. Skarsgård returned as Pennywise. For the full release schedule and runtimes, IT movies in order lays out both films, and the IT movies hub covers the series as a whole.

Both films earned a little under half of their money in the domestic market, and the rest came from overseas. It (2017) took $328.9 million in the domestic market and $390.9 million internationally, so about 46 percent of its $719.8 million came from North America. It Chapter Two (2019) took $211.6 million domestically and $261.5 million internationally, which puts its domestic share at roughly 45 percent of $473.1 million. The split barely moved between the two films, which suggests the sequel lost audience evenly at home and abroad rather than in one region.

The combined domestic total of $540.5 million and international total of $652.4 million are simple sums of the two film records. Because the international figure is the larger one for each film, the IT movies depend on overseas ticket sales more than the domestic chart suggests. If you are searching for the IT box office collection worldwide, the $1.19 billion figure is the one to use, and the domestic and international columns show where it came from.

The two budgets add up to $114 million, and the sequel accounts for most of it. Box Office Mojo and The Numbers both list $35 million for It (2017), and Box Office Mojo lists $79 million for It Chapter Two (2019). That means the second film cost about 2.3 times as much as the first. The extra money bought a larger and more expensive adult ensemble, a running time that stretched from 135 minutes to 169 minutes, and a location shoot in which Port Hope, Ontario stood in for Derry, Maine, according to Global News.

Budgets in the table are production budgets only. Marketing and distribution costs are not part of the figure, and studios rarely publish them, so the table cannot say what either film earned in profit. What it can say is how many dollars came back for each dollar spent on making the film, and that comparison is the heart of the next section.

The IT box office is a theatrical record, so it covers only the two films. The 1990 miniseries and the HBO series IT: Welcome to Derry (2025) are television productions, and they do not appear in the table because they carry no theatrical gross. Both films were released by Warner Bros. and were produced under the New Line banner, and each opened in the United States in the first full week of September, a month that is not usually thought of as a blockbuster window. In the United Kingdom the dates matched the United States, and in Australia the films opened a day earlier, on September 7, 2017 and September 5, 2019, according to TMDB release data.

These are lifetime totals, so they also answer the question of what the IT box office is today. No third theatrical film has a date, so the totals will not move because of a new opening. Warner Bros. Pictures and Cosm have announced that the existing IT film is coming to Cosm venues, but no dates were given. Anything about a sequel is covered on the page for the next IT film, where the status is still unconfirmed.

In my opinion, both films were hits, but they were very different kinds of hit: It (2017) was a runaway success, and It Chapter Two was a solid, expensive one. The fair reading comes from comparing what each film cost with what it earned.

Start with It (2017). A $35 million budget returned $719.8 million worldwide, which is roughly 20 times its cost. For a horror film rated R in the US and 15 in the UK, that is an extreme return. Paradoxically, the modest budget made the success larger. A film that costs $35 million needs only a fraction of that gross to pay its bills, and nearly everything after that is a bonus for Warner Bros. The comparison I reach for is a small local diner that suddenly sells out every night: the building cost almost nothing, so every full table is pure upside.

Now the harder question: is It Chapter Two a hit or a flop? The numbers say hit, with a caveat. It earned $473.1 million on $79 million, about six times its budget, so on paper it comfortably covered its cost. But, the budget more than doubled from the first film, while the worldwide gross fell by about a third (from $719.8 million to $473.1 million). The domestic gross dropped by a similar margin, from $328.9 million to $211.6 million. A studio's final profit depends on more than the budget and the gross, so I would not claim to know the exact profit on either film.

Why did the second film earn less? It could be argued that the first film drew in audiences who then found the sequel's 169 minute running time and adult cast a harder sell. The story also moved from a group of children to their adult counterparts, which shifted the tone from coming of age horror to a reunion with a heavier comic streak. Perhaps the most telling point is that the series still kept its audience in the hundreds of millions. If you are weighing which film to start with, the first is the safer bet on both story and money, and IT movies ranked gives my full opinion on how the two compare as films.

It is fair as a rough guide, though the two films were not working from the same starting point. It (2017) came out with a young cast and Skarsgård as Pennywise, and nobody could know in advance how it would perform. It Chapter Two arrived with an audience already in place and a much higher bar to clear. So, a gross that is about 34 percent lower reads less like a collapse and more like a sequel returning to a size that fits a bigger price tag. The domestic drop was about 36 percent and the international drop about 33 percent, which is a very even decline.

The first film also produced about 60 percent of the franchise's total worldwide gross on less than a third of its combined budget. That is the number I keep returning to. Spread across the series, the two films returned about $10.50 for every dollar of production budget, and the combined gross less combined budget leaves roughly $1.08 billion before marketing costs and theater shares are taken out. Those deductions are real and large, so I treat that figure as a ceiling rather than a profit.

They do not tell us how the films were received over time, how many tickets were sold, or what the films earned on streaming and home video. Box Office Mojo records ticket sales, and ticket prices changed between 2017 and 2019, so a straight comparison of dollars is only an approximation of audience size. The totals also say nothing about the 1990 miniseries or the HBO series IT: Welcome to Derry (2025), which belong to television and sit outside the theatrical record. If you want to see where the films stream today, where to watch IT lists the current options.

Together, the two IT movies recorded about $1.19 billion on $114 million of combined budgets. That is a franchise that paid for itself many times over, which is the main reason people keep asking about the next IT film even though no studio source has announced one. For how the casting shaped the pull, see the IT cast page, and the IT movies hub links every film and spoke if you want the rest of the series.