IT: Welcome to Derry debuts on HBO on October 26, 2025.
The astronomical box office success of 2017’s IT: Chapter One led to a historically high volume of Stephen King adaptations in the years that followed, so there’s a sense of homecoming that permeates IT: Welcome to Derry, the new HBO Max series rooted in the cycle of Pennywise carnage which precedes the events of Andy Muschietti’s two-part movie version. Muschietti returns to help guide this prequel series as director for the first four episodes. Though the premiere episode rushes to lay a lot of groundwork, it suggests we’re in for a thoughtful and savage exploration of just how deep the rot of It runs through Derry.
Welcome to Derry has the benefit of starting off on incredibly solid ground: not only did the creative team - including producer Barbara Muschietti and co-producer Jason Fuchs, who serves as co-showrunner here with Brad Caleb Kane - have two feature films to establish their own version of Derry and its relationship to Pennywise, but this new series has a ton of untapped material from the original King novel to pull from: the interstitial Derry town history chapters which punctuate the interweaving kid and adult timelines. These passages give the reader a sense of how Pennywise’s hunger for fear has flared up in predictable 27-year intervals over time, usually in the form of child disappearances that crescendo into some sort of mass casualty event.
Muschietti’s films moved the events of the book up so that Chapter Two could be set in the modern day… or maybe it was more so that Chapter One could be set in the 1980s and take advantage of the decade’s Stranger Things-fueled popularity (casting Finn Wolfhard as Richie Tozier didn’t hurt those efforts.) That leaves the originally 1930s-set and racially-charged tragedy Welcome to Derry’s first season adapts to land squarely in the middle of the civil rights movement in the 1960s, which feels like a pretty compelling and dramatically fertile shift. And given that the 1990 miniseries set its kids storyline in the book-accurate 1950s, the 1960s time period here gives Welcome to Derry an instant sense of cohesion to what It should feel like onscreen, something helped along with some really fantastic production design and costume work already apparent through this first hour.
Welcome to Derry’s premiere tracks two storylines: the kids on the front lines of Pennywise’s latest cycle of torment, and the arrival into Derry of Major Leroy Hanlon (Jovan Adepo). There’s a widely held opinion about pretty much every iteration of It that the Losers’ Club’s first encounter with Pennywise as children is more entertaining than their final confrontation with him as adults. Nothing about Welcome to Derry’s premiere is going to dispel the notion that the younger characters’ perspective on Pennywise is the more interesting one.
As Hanlon, a B-52 test pilot who will go on to be the grandfather of Losers’ Club founding member Mike Hanlon (he appears briefly in IT: Chapter One), Adepo brings a steadiness to Leroy that’ll be fun to see get challenged by the supernatural horrors ahead. But it’s on the airbase that the Welcome to Derry premiere’s efforts to lay groundwork for the season ahead feel the most laborious. Hanlon’s icy reception from some of his white colleagues, a “special projects” building no one will answer questions about, and the warning glances of another black airman Tap to RevealTap to RevealTap to Reveal portend more sinister conflicts he’ll have to navigate as the season goes, but the intrigue they’re setting up here isn’t all that intriguing yet, and with no obvious connection to the more interesting Pennywise stuff going on in town, not even the attack Hanlon suffers from masked assailants elevates this storyline past feeling like more than setup, even if it’s for what will prove to be a critical fork of the plot going forward.
No, Welcome to Derry’s premiere is at its scariest and most effective while following the kids of Derry as they first begin to encounter Pennywise. Muschietti’s movies nailed the creeping weirdness and dread that sets in as kids get closer to It, and Muschietti marshals that surreal sensibility to great effect in this episode’s stellar opening sequence, as loner Matty Clements (Miles Ekhardt) hitches a ride home with the wrong family. As Matty realizes he’s in trouble, Muschietti dials up the intensity with increasingly quick cuts around to everyone inside the car as they act stranger and stranger… poor little Matty Clements, you were doomed from the second we met your nearly-teenaged ass sucking on a pacifier in a movie theater. That’s just not something you can do in a horror story and expect to make it to the end credits, kid.
The way Muschietti draws out the demise of the young outsider, and how he subjects Matty to satisfyingly shocking imagery before he goes, promises an eye towards plenty more psychologically-oppressive wind-ups to come in future episodes. The payoffs in this first episode, though, do yield mixed results. Scares that lean on quick glimpses of something that shouldn’t be there, or voices coming from where they shouldn’t, go a lot farther than ones reliant on letting the monster fully out from under the bed. If you found the scares in the It movies which leaned more on CG a letdown, the main form Pennywise takes when it does appear in this first episode will likely be more distraction than nightmare fuel. Still, Pennywise’s first attacks definitely communicate one thing about Welcome to Derry: there’s likely no shortage of blood and gore coming our way, and a few plot-armored characters aside, no kid or adult is safe.
What both the adult and kid storylines do highlight effectively, and set up as an important dynamic to follow going forward, is the parallel between Pennywise’s malice and the banal indifference of Derry’s citizenry towards the plights of others: how kids recognize and rail against it, how young adults get cynical and tend towards it, and how those in middle-age and beyond seem doomed to it entirely. Matty’s disappearance weighs heavily on classmates Lilly, Teddie and Phil, and though none of them were particularly close with the missing boy, all three feel varying degrees of guilt at having missed chances to connect with him before he disappeared. Lilly’s the most intriguing of the younger characters introduced, as the Matty situation is compounding some pre-existing grief that young actor Clara Stack handles capably. Lilly also brings along her no-bullshit best friend Marge, whose big personality and take-no-prisoners attitude already makes her a candidate for best character on the show.
And how’s Bill Skarsgård as Pennywise in this first episode? Well, if there was something to say, it’d have been said by now! He’s not around! No, Welcome to Derry seems intent to parse out its Pennywise appearances sparingly… and whether that's for purely narrative reasons or because Skarsgård’s schedule’s a lot more full than it used to be doesn't matter when the end result leaves Pennywise feeling as ominous a background presence as he should through the series premiere. Glimpses of Pennywise’s cocked eye or his giant buck teeth appearing in the mouths of those antagonizing the kids are as much as we see, but for now, that feels in keeping with the limited amount of information the kids have on the monster whose bloodthirst they’ve only scratched the surface of.
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