It took a while, but HBO has finally made it official. IT: Welcome to Derry is coming back for a second season, and it is going further into the past.
The renewal landed Monday, August 17, roughly eight months after the first season wrapped its run in December. Season 2 jumps back from 1962 to 1935, dropping us into Derry during the Great Depression, and it centers on the massacre of the Bradley Gang.
Why 1935 Is a Great Choice
If you have read Stephen King’s novel, that name probably rang a bell. The Bradley Gang were bank robbers who stopped in Derry to buy ammunition on their way somewhere else. Per the official logline, they end up facing something considerably worse than a shootout. Andy Muschietti described it in about the same terms last spring: they were passing through, they needed ammo, and something horrible happened.
What makes this a smart pick is the flavor of the era. Season 1 gave us early-60s Derry, which still had a buttoned-up small-town normalcy to peel back. 1935 does not. Muschietti has said he wants that Depression-era desperation in the air, with everyone scrambling to survive and making bad choices to do it. Pennywise has always thrived on a town willing to look the other way, and 1935 is a year when plenty of people had bigger problems than a missing kid.
Who Is Coming Back
Brad Caleb Kane returns as showrunner, with one change worth noting. He shared the job with Jason Fuchs on Season 1, and this time he is running it solo. Andy and Barbara Muschietti are back as executive producers, saying in their statement that it is a privilege to keep expanding King’s world and that they love their jobs.
Sarah Aubrey, who heads HBO Max Original Programming, said the team is eager to return to Derry and build further on what the Muschiettis have made. As for Bill Skarsgård, he is expected to return as Pennywise, but HBO has not announced any cast yet, so hold that one loosely.
The Backward Plan
Most prequels run forward. Welcome to Derry is running backward, one Pennywise cycle at a time. The thing wakes roughly every 27 years, so 1935 sits exactly one cycle before Season 1. The Muschiettis have said from the start that this was a three-season blueprint built around three of the Derry Interludes from King’s novel: the burning of the Black Spot in Season 1, the Bradley Gang next, and a third season Andy Muschietti has described as covering the Easter egg hunt explosion in 1908. To be clear, HBO has not renewed a Season 3. That plan is what the creators have described, not a network commitment.
The structure is what elevates this. Every season peels back another layer of a town that has been feeding the same thing for generations, which means Pennywise is not running out of victims. The show is just digging into ground that was already full. You are not watching a monster escalate. You are watching a pattern get older and older, and realizing it was never going to have a beginning you could point to.
No premiere date yet. Season 1 ran October 26 through December 14, so a similar fall slot would make sense, but HBO has not said anything.
