'It: Welcome to Derry' Creators on the Premiere's Shocking (and Disgusting!) Twists and Their ThreeSeason Plan for Pennywise Andrew McGowanOctober 27, 2025 at 3:15 AM 0 SPOILER ALERT: This story contains spoilers from the series premiere of "It: Welcome to Derry," now streaming on HBO Max.
- - 'It: Welcome to Derry' Creators on the Premiere's Shocking (and Disgusting!) Twists and Their Three-Season Plan for Pennywise
Andrew McGowanOctober 27, 2025 at 3:15 AM
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SPOILER ALERT: This story contains spoilers from the series premiere of "It: Welcome to Derry," now streaming on HBO Max.
The first episode of "It: Welcome to Derry" kicks off not just one, but three prospective seasons of television focusing on the eponymous Maine town and the origins of its harrowing clown-curse, series co-creators Andy and Barbara Muschietti tell Variety. "Our big story arc involves three seasons, mainly based on the three critical cycles of Pennywise, which are 1962, 1935 and 1908," Andy says.
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As the first episode reveals, Season 1 takes place primarily in 1962, 25 years preceding the events of "It: Chapter One." As a direct prequel to the Andy Muschietti-directed 2017 film, it explores the previous generation of kids and adults in Derry, combating and unpacking the origins of franchise antagonist Pennywise the Clown (Bill Skarsgård).
While Muschietti's two "It" films followed the main storylines of Stephen King's 1986 novel, "Welcome to Derry" explores the deeper lore alluded to throughout the book. "I went into the book and looked at the interludes," Andy says. "I realized there was a hidden story there, and that Stephen King was leaving crumbs that could guide is somewhere. It's a story told backwards."
The Muschiettis were reluctant to share details about the series' long term future, though the book provides hints about what happened in Derry during Pennywise's previous cycles. The town's origins are bizarre, involving a celestial object crashing into Derry and a divine turtle-like being named Maturin. Eagle-eyed viewers will notice moments in which turtles appear on-screen in the "It" films as well as "Welcome to Derry." "They're a lot of Easter eggs," Andy says with a laugh, "And over the course of these three seasons, we're gonna probably get closer to the meaning of the turtle, how it affects the behavior of our characters and the mythological backstory."
Also featured in the book and expanded upon in the show's first episode is Derry's dark history of racism. The premiere sees Major Leroy Hanlon (Jovan Adepo) arrive in the predominantly white Derry to swiftly encounter disrespect and racist attacks. The book also ties Pennywise's origins to Derry's original Native American population in a colonial allegory. "Stephen King is a writer who is very sensitive to social injustice," says Andy, "He speaks about the evil of a clown, but he's mainly talking about the evil things that we do to each other as human beings. Most of the horrible things that happen in Derry are man made."
While this social commentary was present in the subtext of the "It" films, it rises to the surface in the show. The emphasis reflects the cultural and political shifts that have taken place since the movies came out in 2017 and 2019. Barbara — who executive produced both films as well as the series — says: "A lot of us are in a state of alarm. There is more awareness and reception to all of these matters because the perils that we thought were gone are back. It blatantly hits home."
The show's intellectual horrors in no way dilute the on-screen gore, though. The first episode, which Andy directed, features three special effects-heavy sequences of monstrous incarnations attacking children. The first comes in the show's shocking cold open, in which a mother gives birth to a demonic baby that subsequently attacks an 11-year-old boy.
"It was very clear to Andy and I that we had to start the show with something very strong," Barbara says. "Because that's the way we had set the tone in the movies, both with the Georgie [Jackson Robert Scott] scene and the Adrian Mellon [Xavier Dolan] scene. So we had to get to something very intense."
The episode's final scene is similarly graphic, and adds a harrowing plot twist. The episode introduces an ensemble of young characters who the audience assumes will be the show's main heroes. However, in the final scene, the mutant baby returns to kill off half of them in a brutal sequence. As Andy puts it, the twist communicates that "nobody is safe in this world."
"It's not a cliffhanger in the classic sense," he continues. "You're left with nothing. You're asking, 'Now what?'"
"It was important for us to tell a very unpredictable story, because we couldn't repeat the movies," Barbara says. "We needed the kids, because there's no 'It' without kids, and we needed them to become friends and fight this monster together. But we needed to subvert the story somehow."
With seven more episodes to come, each airing Sunday nights on HBO, and two more seasons on the horizon, more twists are bound to come. Given the first episode's fatal climax, the story's future is nebulous and opaque. Only one thing is certain: Nobody is safe in Derry.
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