In the three (yes, THREE) years since HBO announced plans to move forward with an It prequel series, fans of Stephen King’s horror novel-turned-film-series have been eagerly waiting for today. And what is today, you ask? Why, it’s the arrival of the first teaser for It: Welcome to Derry. Finally, the first look is here, and it is painting a truly terrifying and intriguing picture of what’s to come when the production makes its way onto the streamer later this year. Bringing a story to life that we’ve never seen play out on our screens, the title will give fans plenty of background about the sinister alien entity who caused so much terror and left nothing but chaos and destruction in its wake. With Bill Skarsgård returning to the role that he performed oh so well in Andrés Muschietti’s two-film series, audiences are truly in for quite a treat.
Thanks to the iconic Tim Curry-led miniseries of 1990 and the aforementioned films, King fans have seen plenty of on-screen tellings of The Losers Club’s showdown as both kids and adults against the titular killer clown in It. The stakes are going to be higher than ever in It: Welcome to Derry, with no characters being completely safe from the murderous bloodshed that will pour out of the sewers and onto the streets of the eponymous town. Like filmmaker Lindsey Anderson Beer previously did with the Pet Sematary offshoot, Pet Sematary: Bloodlines, the It-centered series will focus on separate tales from King’s original novel.
Andrés Muschietti is Playing the Long Game with ‘It: Welcome to Derry’
Previously teasing some of those chilling stories, Muschietti said:
“It’s a story that’s based on the interludes of the book. The interludes are basically chapters that reflect Mike Hanlon’s research. They’re fragments of his research. For 27 years, it’s the guy trying to figure out what it is, what did it, who did it, who saw it, and all that stuff… 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. Every time [Pennywise] comes out of hibernation, there is a catastrophic event that happens at the beginning of that cycle.”
While we saw bits and pieces of these events in the movies, the series will give its creative team plenty of extra time to really dig into the guts of it — both literally and figuratively. In all, Muschietti is hoping to explore the “catastrophic events” over a three-season arc.
Check out the debut teaser for It: Welcome to Derry above, and stay tuned to Collider for updates surrounding the highly-anticipated horror prequel series.
