IT: The Weird Way The Number 27 Connects The Book & Movies
The number 27 might seem like any other, but when applied to Stephen King's IT book and its movie adaptations, creates odd connections. Numbers can be a tricky thing. As the old saying goes, numbers don't lie. They either are, or they aren't. Yet, numbers can sure be used for lies, as incorrect numbers end up knowingly presented by the shadier elements of humanity in an effort to trick the gullible. It's easy to see how Pennywise is able to exert so much control over people, as humans at their worst can already kind of be naturally bad.
Humanity's foibles aside, numbers can reveal more than one might think, and can also end up causing ties between things that perhaps weren't intended to be there. The number 27 has an obvious in-universe significance in King's gargantuan IT novel, as the entity behind Pennywise's clowning around wakes up every 27 years, feeds on victims, then goes back into hibernation underneath Derry. Although that was curiously changed to a more round 30 years in the 1990 IT miniseries.
The 27 year number was put back into place for the 2017 IT movie, but that was actually only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to 27's unexpected significance to the IT adaptations. It's not quite "Jim Carrey in The Number 23" crazy, but it's certainly curious.
The most obvious connection IT 2017 makes to the number 27 is that it released 27 years after the 1990 miniseries starring Tim Curry as Pennywise. But there's another bit of number strangeness, and it's a bit hard to imagine Hollywood executives coming up with such a subtle reference to it. IT 2017 was released on September 8, or 9/8/2017. The sum of those six numbers is 27. Furthermore IT Chapter Two released on September 6, 2019, or 9/6/2019. Those six numbers also add up to 27.
In a more specific, but thus even stranger twist of fate, 2017's young actors Jaeden Martell (Bill), Jeremy Ray Taylor (Ben), and Nicholas Hamilton (Henry), are all 27 years younger than Jonathan Brandis, Brandon Crane, and Jared Blancard, who played the same roles in the 1990 IT miniseries. Taking things further, Brandis sadly died by suicide at the age of 27, which actually puts him in a creepy "club" of celebrities to die at that young age. Are all these disparate facts and events relating IT's adaptations to the number 27 sheer matters of coincidence? Yeah, they probably are. Still, they make for a fittingly spooky round-up, and a macabre conversation piece.