‘It: Welcome to Derry’ Creator Teases “Very Different Situation” in Season 2

The first season of IT: Welcome to Derry wrapped up in January of this year. The show, a prequel to It (2017) and It Chapter Two (2019), started out in 1962, when a group of kids in a seemingly quiet small town grapple with a horrific force that tends to take the form of a murderous clown called Pennywise (Bill Skarsgård). HBO took its time renewing the show for Season 2, but it happened, and now creator Andy Muschietti is sharing details of what to expect.

The new season will take place in 1935, during the Great Depression. In Stephen King’s original novel, simply called It, Pennywise emerges from his slumber every 27 years to wreak havoc on the Maine town of Derry, and each season of the show will go back in time to show us another cycle. “There’s gonna be a lot of that Depression-era hustling in the air in our characters,” Muschietti tells Variety. “Everybody’s trying to get by and survive the circumstances. They are gonna do crazy things,” Muschietti says. “And of course, the social, cultural, horrible things that were happening in the era, too. We’re not going to skip those. [They are the] very center and the heart of our story.”

In this case, on the surface, Derry is a graveyard almost. It’s a carcass of something because people are depleted, poor, tired, jobless, homeless. The kids don’t have a suburban, comforting life. They’re in a very different situation. Some of them are orphans or runaways, and so the environment is pretty bleak. But there’s always the aspect of hope that is always there, burning, and it’s what keeps our new group going.

It’s interesting that Muschietti mentions that Derry will be in dire straits in Season 2. In the book, we learn that Derry remains a prosperous town for pretty much its entire existence, in part because Pennywise uses his power to manipulate things from his underground lair. But perhaps even Pennywise can’t do much to fight the stock market crash of 1929.

Like the first season, the second season of IT: Welcome to Derry will adapt an “interlude” from King’s book, where we take a break from the main action to learn about Derry’s bloody history. In this case, we’ll learn about the Bradley Gang Massacre, when a group of outlaws hides in Derry while fleeing the FBI, until the townspeople decide to do something about it.

Since the second season is set decades before the first, none of the young characters we met will be around. However, their ancestors will be. At the end of Season 1, we learn that Pennywise exists outside of time, and that he’s trying to eliminate certain family bloodlines that will eventually produce the people who destroy him in the It movies. “There will always be the connection, there’s a family tree that appears,” Muschietti explained.

As for when we’ll see all of this, it probably won’t be for a while. “We’re very excited, we’re in the writers’ room right now,” Muschietti said. If Muschietti and his team are only now breaking the story or writing the scripts, we likely won’t get new episodes of IT: Welcome to Derry until 2027 at the very earliest. In the meantime, there are many other Stephen King adaptations to enjoy.