It has shattered numerous box office records for a horror movie, grossing over $600M globally and already securing a 2019 sequel. The numbers suggest the movie could be better classified as a blockbuster but was the audience reflective of this? The Movio data science team took a closer look at the moviegoers that contributed to It’s phenomenal success and compared this data with the insights they drew in this analysis of horror movie clusters. We used Movio Media’s powerful insights and data to analyze the evolution of the movie’s audience composition to find out more. 

It’s audience evolved over the first four weeks of its theatrical run in a similar way to most blockbusters, starting out male-skewed (61% vs 52% for movie-going overall) and predominantly young (66% of the audience was 14-30 yo on opening night) growing older and more female-skewed over time. 

The audience also differs slightly compared to a typical horror movie. The It audience attracted more infrequent moviegoers (28% vs 15%), attracted slightly fewer females (45% vs 50%) and was more caucasian (57% vs 45% for the average horror movie) than hispanic (23% vs 28%). 

However as the content was still very much horror, It did not evolve like a true four quadrant movie, failing to attract the 50+ audience.