Pennywise will be waking from his slumber once again as development on the second season of the prequel It: Welcome to Derry is picking up and promises to be “exciting” and “different” from the first season as well as “very, very bloody.”
It: Welcome to Derry is a prequel to Andy Muschietti’s 2017 film adaptation of Stephen King’s horror novel It, focusing on a terrifying demon named Pennywise who takes on the guise of a clown to eat children. Pennywise torments the town of Derry for a year before entering a 27-year hibernation, where in It: Chapter Two the main children called the Loser’s Club have to return to Derry as adults to kill Pennywise once and for all.
The prequel takes place during Pennywise’s last killing spree in 1962, again focusing on a group of children as they discover the town’s secret monster alongside a group of the military attempting to capture Pennywise. The season expanded on elements in King’s novel as he described the backstory of Derry and Pennywise’s involvement throughout the town’s history, being behind or at least playing a role in several of the town’s tragic incidents.
The second season will take audiences to 1935 and focus on the Bradley gang, a group of bank robbers who terrorized Derry and the surrounding area throughout the 1930s. The group is led by brothers George and Al Bradley while Kitty Donahue, George’s wife, also took part in the siblings’ crime sprees which culminated in a massive shootout in Derry for which Pennywise was present. The Bradley Gang was mentioned in the first It movie and their bullet-ridden car was pulled from a lake in the first season of Welcome to Derry.
Speaking with Entertainment Weekly, showrunner Brad Caleb Kane, who just served as showrunner on the Friday The 13th prequel series Crystal Lake, returns as Welcome to Derry‘s sole showrunner and teased how the second season will be different than the first.
“We’re making something very exciting for Season 2 that I can’t talk too much about, but it’s got a different palette,” Kane said. “It’s the Depression; it’s 1935. Beyond that, I can’t talk about it, but you can imagine a Warner Bros. gangster picture through the lens of Pennywise and Stephen King. That’s kind of what we’re doing.”
Kane had devoted much of his time since the conclusion of the first season to Crystal Lake, but now that the series is done development on It: Welcome to Derry is picking up much faster. “We’re deep into the writers’ room now. We have multiple scripts, we’ve broken more than half the story for season 2, and we’re edging into pre-production. Beyond that, I think I’ll get suffocated by somebody if I tell you too much more. But, yes, we are deep into it, and it is happening. It’s very exciting. It’s very, very bloody, and it’s very different from season 1.”
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There is no word on when production might begin or a release window so we may have a while to wait for the season. And while it has not been officially confirmed, Bill Skarsgård is expected to return as Pennywise to terrorize another generation of Derry’s townfolk.
