IT and IT: Chapter Two dropped into theaters in 2017 and 2019, adapting Stephen King's classic story about a killer clown from outer space and earning over a billion dollars in the process. Horror always puts butts in seats, especially when it's this well done.
HBO is hoping to capitalize on that success with an IT prequel series called IT: Welcome to Derry, which will premiere on HBO and Max sometime this year. The new show is produced by the brother-sister team of Andy and Barbara Muschietti, who respectively directed and produced the two movies.
King's book is about a strange entity known only as It that awakens from hibernation every 30 years or so to prey on the people of Derry, Maine; although it's true form is beyond human comprehension, it tends to take the shape of a scary-ass clown called Pennywise, and it finds children especially delicious.
It is vanquished by the Losers Club in the second movie, so how would a spinoff series work? Well, in King's extremely long book, the character of Mike Hanlon spends a lot of time researching It's past, looking up the other times it awakened and wreaked havoc in the town. In the book, these semi-flashback segments are called "Interludes," and if you don't think King wrote enough of them to fill out a TV series, then you're not familiar with how much that man wrote in the '80s. Dear god, was he wordy.
The first season of the show will take us back to 1962, when It preyed on racial tensions to inflame the populace, and then ate its fill in the resulting chaos. The action in that Interlude centers around a nightclub called the Black Spot. Speaking to Radio TU, Andy Muschietti said that he and his team had plans for three seasons, each based on a different Interlude, and each taking us further back in time.
“So they talk about catastrophic events from the past, like the fire in the Black Spot…. the massacre of the Bradley Gang, a gang of bank robbers in the ’30s… and the explosion of the Kitchener Ironworks,” Muschietti said. “Every time [Pennywise] comes out of hibernation, there is a catastrophic event that happens at the beginning of that cycle."
"We are basing the three seasons of this series on each of these catastrophic events...There’s a reason why the story is told backwards. So the first season is 1962, the second season is 1935, and the third season is 1908."
HBO wants to get moving on season 2 of IT: Welcome to Derry "as soon as possible"
Muschietti may be getting ahead of himself here, because right now only the first season has been shot. It's possible that season 1 fares so poorly that HBO opts not to renew the series, but somehow I doubt that will happen. It's been a while since I've read IT, but I remember the Interludes about the Black Spot and the Bradley Gang pretty well, and they were both all kinds of creepy. If Muschietti and company do a good job of bringing those stories to life, I think this series will have a future.
And it sounds like HBO feels the same way, as Muschietti says that they're happy with how the first season of IT: Welcome to Derry turned out and are “very interested in making the second season as soon as possible.”
All that's left now is for HBO and Max to announce a release date for season 1. We'll keep our eyes peeled.
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