HBO Renews 'It: Welcome to Derry' for Season 2, With a New Showrunner and a 1935 Bloodbath
HBO has renewed It: Welcome to Derry for a second season, nearly a year after the Stephen King prequel premiered on the network in October. The series, produced by Warner Bros. Television, ranked among the top four series premieres globally in HBO Max history and earned roughly 80 percent critics and audience scores on Rotten Tomatoes (Deadline; The Hollywood Reporter).
Season 2 jumps back to 1935, deep in the Great Depression, and dramatises the bloody massacre of the Bradley Gang — a group of bank robbers who stop in the Maine town of Derry to buy ammunition (Deadline). It is a piece of King lore referenced in his 1986 novel It but never fully depicted on screen.
Behind the scenes, the writers' room is getting a new lead. Brad Caleb Kane, who co-ran Season 1 with Jason Fuchs, takes over as sole showrunner for Season 2. Fuchs is not named in the renewal announcement as continuing in that role. Andy Muschietti and Barbara Muschietti remain executive producers under their Double Dream banner; Andy Muschietti directed the two It feature films for New Line that established the visual world the series expands on (Deadline). Roy Lee, Dan Lin, Jamie Travis and Dhana Gilbert also serve as executive producers (The Hollywood Reporter).
Bill Skarsgård reprises his role as Pennywise the Clown, the shape-shifting entity that has menaged Derry across centuries (Deadline).
The gap between Season 1's premiere and the renewal was longer than typical for a show that performed well. According to The Hollywood Reporter, the creative team chose to restart the Season 2 story from scratch, which delayed the greenlight (The Hollywood Reporter).
Sarah Aubrey, head of HBO Max Original Programming, said of the renewal that Kane and the Muschiettis "will break new ground" in the new season (The Hollywood Reporter).
For a series rooted in one of horror's most durable properties, the Season 2 pivot to a new decade and a new showrunner signals HBO's confidence that the Derry mythology can sustain an anthology-style approach — each season a different era, a different set of victims, the same ancient evil underneath the town.
