Does anyone else think there's a pretty good 3.5 hr fan edit hiding within these two movies? I think it'd be interesting to see the multiple time lines cut together and layered concurrently as presented in the book. It would certainty help cut the bloat from Chapter 2.
Personally I'd use about 2hrs from Part 1 and 1.5hrs from Part 2.
The director is planning a huge supercut that will insert even more footage (hopefully giving Mike more screen time) and rearrange the two films to resemble the structure of the novel.
While that won't fix the multitude of problems in these movies (too much CGI, lack of scares, over-emphasis on humour), I agree that it will eliminate some of the bloat from 'IT Chapter 2', namely the huge amount of flashbacks to the first film and the weird way that the adults remembered encounters they had with IT as children that weren't featured in 'IT Chapter 1'.
A re-sequenced supercut would also make the character development of Richie seem more organic, rather than the character suddenly becoming more prominent when played by Bill Hader in 'IT Chapter 2'.
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I'd like a supercut as well, but KEEP Chapter 1 separate from the rest and just put the two together with no credits or anything. Don't chop up Chapter 1 into chunks!!!
"the weird way that the adults remembered encounters they had with IT as children that weren't featured in 'IT Chapter 1'."
So in Chapter 2, we see encounters the kids had with it, and their clubhouse, that we didn't see in Chapter 1? So what? There wasn't enough room in Chapter 1 for that, but it's not weird at all.
"and rearrange the two films to resemble the structure of the novel."
Why do that? The structure of the IT book SUCKS BALLS, to be honest. The first movie worked so well because it DIDN'T have jumps between child and adult. Chapter 2 has flashbacks to them as children, nothing more.