Pennywise will return to HBO in season two of IT: Welcome to Derry, and we’ll see a very different version of the killer clown, according to returning showrunner Brad Caleb Kane (Crystal Lake).
Kane told Deadline that Bill Skarsgård plays “a different kind of Pennywise, Pennywise the way you’ve never seen that character before.“
The brief comments shouldn’t be too surprising considering that it’s set in 1935, during the Great Depression, and tracks the Bradley Gang Massacre from Stephen King‘s IT novel. A gang of outlaws rolls into Derry, and it leads to a bloodbath under Pennywise’s influence.
“It’s a Warner Bros. gangster movie. It’s bank robbers and Hoovervilles and street urchins riding the rails religious fundamentalism,” Kane says of the bigger second season.
The showrunner also gives an update on season two’s status: “We’re writing the scripts. We’re about halfway through the writing of the scripts. We have a production schedule, we’re greenlit for a Season 2, and Andy Muschietti’s out there casting.”
IT wakes up and feeds every 27 years, so the series is tracking those cycles throughout time. The show’s first season took place in 1962, while the first IT (2017) movie was set in 1989 and Muschietti’s IT: Chapter Two (2019) jumped forward 27 years to 2016. Each cycle begins and ends with a horrific act, while Pennywise feasts on children throughout.
Producer and series developer Andy Muschietti previously revealed that Season 3 would be the explosion of the Kitchener Iron Works, which is a big explosion during an Easter egg hunt where a hundred kids lost their lives. This particularly grim catastrophe was briefly seen in photograph form in IT (2017).
Muschietti previously hid his three-season plan in plain sight with IT: Welome to Derry season one’s opening credits, which features Pennywise’s infamous exploits including the Black Spot Massacre, the Bradley Gang Massacre, and the Kitchener Iron Works explosion.
See if you can spot them below (and get the theme song stuck in your head):