*HBO has pulled back the circus curtain on “Welcome to Derry,” releasing a chilling first trailer that rewinds the clock nearly three decades before the events chronicled in the two “It” films.
Set in the 1960s, the limited series tracks Pennywise’s previous feeding frenzy, long before the Losers Club first confronted him in the modern timeline. Bill Skarsgård returns to the storm drain as the malevolent clown, joined by Taylour Paige, Jovan Adepo, Chris Chalk, James Remar, Stephen Rider, Madeleine Stowe, and Rudy Mancuso.
Skarsgård initially felt he had closed the book on Pennywise, but he said on the Happy Sad Confused podcast, “I felt like I was done with it … But it’s Barbara (Muschietti) and Andy (Muschietti), and I love them … and I enjoyed it more than I thought I would. We got to explore different sides of old Pennywise. There’s some cool stuff in there that we haven’t seen.”
Showrunners Jason Fuchs and Brad Caleb Kane mine Stephen King’s lore for the series, focusing on the “interludes” collected by Mike Hanlon (the Black kid in “IT”). “This is a book we love a lot, and we felt that there was still a lot of story to be covered,” explain executive producers Andy and Barbara Muschietti. “It’s so rich with characters and events, we thought we would do justice to the book and the fans by going back into this world. … This story focuses also on the use of fear as a weapon, which is one of the things that is also relevant to our times.”
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Behind the Red Balloon
“Welcome to Derry” is produced by HBO and Warner Bros. Television. Andy, Barbara and Jason Fuchs developed the story, with Fuchs scripting the pilot and sharing showrunning duties with Kane. Executive producers also include Brad Caleb Kane, David Coatsworth, Bill Skarsgård, Shelley Meals, Roy Lee and Dan Lin.
Release Plans
Originally announced as a Max exclusive, the series will now bow directly on HBO in fall 2025; details on whether episodes will drop weekly or all at once are still under wraps. Until then, the new teaser trailer offers the first unsettling glimpse of Pennywise’s earlier reign of terror, and a reminder that, in Derry, the nightmare resurfaces every 27 years.
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