The writers' room for Season 2 of It: Welcome to Derry is already underway. Co-creator Andy Muschietti confirmed the news to Variety, saying, "We're very excited, we're in the writers' room right now."
The new season will move back in time to 1935, centering on an event drawn from the Stephen King novel that inspired the series: the Bradley Gang Massacre. In the book, a group of outlaws hides out in Derry while fleeing the FBI, robbing and murdering store owners and spreading chaos through the town. The new season takes place 27 years before the first season, which follows the mystery of a missing boy against the backdrop of a Cold War military plot.
Muschietti has been direct about what the show will and will not avoid when it comes to depicting the period. "There's gonna be a lot of that depression-era hustling in the air in our characters. Everybody's trying to get by and survive the circumstances. They are gonna do crazy things," he said. "And of course, the social, cultural, horrible things that were happening in the era, too. We're not going to skip those. [They are the] very center and the heart of our story."
The setting will look and feel very different from the first season. Muschietti described the surface of Derry in the 1930s this way: "In this case, on the surface, Derry is a graveyard almost. It's a carcass of something because people are depleted, poor, tired, jobless, homeless. The kids don't have a suburban, comforting life. They're in a very different situation. Some of them are orphans or runaways, and so the environment is pretty bleak. But there's always the aspect of hope that is always there, burning, and it's what keeps our new group going."
The 1930s interlude in King's original novel is relatively brief, so Muschietti and his team, including co-creators Barbara Muschietti and Jason Fuchs, will have room to expand the material. A family bloodline will connect Season 2 to the other timelines. "There will always be the connection, there's a family tree that appears," Muschietti said.
Muschietti first explored Derry and Pennywise in the 2017 film It and its 2019 sequel It: Chapter Two. He has previously described a three-season plan for Welcome to Derry, covering the time periods of 1962, 1935, and 1908, in reverse order. He has called the structure "a story told backwards," saying he noticed that King was "leaving crumbs that could guide us somewhere" in the novel's interludes.
Bill Skarsgård returns as Pennywise for the new season.
