IT: Welcome to Derry debuts on HBO Max on October 26, 2025
There’s something grimly appropriate about returning to Derry, Maine—Stephen King’s fictional hellmouth where children disappear with disturbing regularity and adults respond with practiced indifference. IT: Welcome to Derry, HBO’s ambitious prequel series to Andy Muschietti’s blockbuster film adaptations, makes you feel right at home in America’s worst small town. And that’s exactly the point.
Standing on Solid Ground
The series arrives with considerable advantages. Director Andy Muschietti, who helmed both IT: Chapter One (2017) and IT: Chapter Two (2019), returns to direct the first four episodes, bringing visual continuity and tonal consistency. The creative team—including producer Barbara Muschietti and co-showrunners Jason Fuchs and Brad Caleb Kane—have two feature films’ worth of world-building to draw from, plus a treasure trove of untapped material from King’s novel: those interstitial Derry town history chapters that chronicle Pennywise’s 27-year feeding cycles throughout the decades.
The timeline shift proves inspired. Muschietti’s films moved events forward so Chapter Two could be set in the present day (and Chapter One could capitalize on 1980s nostalgia, à la Stranger Things—casting Finn Wolfhard as Richie Tozier certainly didn’t hurt). That leaves Welcome to Derry to adapt the originally 1930s-set tragedy squarely in the 1960s, placing it in the heart of the civil rights movement. It’s a dramatically fertile shift that gives the series immediate thematic weight, and feels more cohesive with the 1990 miniseries’ 1950s setting. The production design and costume work already visible in this first hour are fantastic, immersing viewers in the period without fanfare.
Two Storylines, One Clear Winner
The premiere tracks two narrative threads: the children experiencing Pennywise’s latest cycle of terror, and the arrival of Major Leroy Hanlon (Jovan Adepo), a B-52 test pilot who will eventually become the grandfather of Losers’ Club member Mike Hanlon (he appears briefly in IT: Chapter One).
Here’s where the episode reveals an imbalance that will feel familiar to any IT fan: the children’s perspective is vastly more compelling than the adults’. It’s a widely held opinion across nearly every iteration of King’s story that the Losers’ Club’s first encounter with Pennywise as kids is more entertaining than their final confrontation as adults. Nothing about Welcome to Derry‘s premiere dispels that notion.
Adepo brings steadiness to Leroy that will be interesting to see challenged by supernatural horrors ahead, but his airbase storyline feels laborious. His icy reception from white colleagues, a mysterious “special projects” building, warning glances from another Black airman—these elements portend sinister conflicts ahead, but the intrigue isn’t intriguing yet. Even an attack by masked assailants feels more like setup than payoff. With no obvious connection to the more interesting Pennywise material happening in town, this thread struggles to justify its screen time.
Where the Terror Lives
Welcome to Derry is at its scariest and most effective while following the kids of Derry as they first encounter Pennywise. Muschietti’s films nailed the creeping weirdness and dread that sets in as children get closer to It, and he marshals that surreal sensibility brilliantly in the episode’s stellar opening sequence.
Loner Matty Clements (Miles Ekhardt) hitches a ride home with the wrong family. As Matty realizes he’s in danger, Muschietti dials up intensity with increasingly quick cuts as everyone in the car acts stranger and stranger. Poor little Matty—doomed from the moment we meet him sucking on a pacifier as a near-teenager 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 young outsider’s demise, subjecting Matty to satisfyingly shocking imagery before he goes, promises plenty more psychologically oppressive wind-ups in future episodes. The payoffs in this first episode yield mixed results, though. Scares leaning on quick glimpses of something that shouldn’t be there, or voices coming from where they shouldn’t, go much farther than ones letting the monster fully emerge. If you found the CGI-heavy scares in the films disappointing, the main form Pennywise takes when it appears here will likely be more distraction than nightmare fuel.
Still, Pennywise’s first attacks communicate one clear message: there’s no shortage of blood and gore coming, and aside from a few plot-armored characters, no kid or adult is safe.
The Real Horror of Derry
What both storylines highlight effectively is the parallel between Pennywise’s malice and the banal indifference of Derry’s citizenry toward others’ suffering. The series sets this up as a crucial dynamic: how kids recognize and rail against it, how young adults grow cynical and tend toward it, and how middle-aged and older residents seem doomed to it entirely.
Matty’s disappearance weighs heavily on classmates Lilly, Teddie, and Phil. Though none were particularly close with the missing boy, all three feel varying degrees of guilt at having missed chances to connect with him. Lilly is the most intriguing younger character introduced, as the Matty situation compounds pre-existing grief that young actor Clara Stack handles capably. Lilly’s best friend Marge brings a no-nonsense attitude and take-no-prisoners personality that already makes her a candidate for best character on the show.
Where’s Pennywise?
And Bill Skarsgård’s Pennywise? Barely here. Welcome to Derry parses out its Pennywise appearances sparingly—whether for narrative reasons or because Skarsgård’s schedule is more packed than during the films doesn’t matter when the end result leaves Pennywise feeling as ominous a background presence as he should be.
Glimpses of Pennywise’s cocked eye or his giant buck teeth appearing in antagonists’ mouths are all we see, but for now, that feels appropriate given the limited information the kids have about the monster whose bloodthirst they’ve only begun to discover.
Technical Strengths and Weaknesses
Muschietti’s direction remains assured, particularly in building dread through atmosphere and suggestion rather than explicit horror. When the premiere leans on practical effects and psychological terror, it excels. When it relies on CGI creatures, it falters—a familiar weakness from the films that unfortunately carries over here.
The 1960s setting is impeccably realized through production design and costuming that never feels like cosplay. The era’s racial tensions provide natural dramatic conflict that enriches rather than exploits the horror elements, though the series will need to navigate these themes carefully as it progresses.
The Verdict
IT: Welcome to Derry‘s premiere accomplishes its most important task: re-establishing Derry and Pennywise with style and expertly drawn-out tension. The first episode makes you feel right at home in King’s most cursed town, even if some CGI-heavy scares fall flat and the adult storyline struggles to match the children’s compelling terror.
Indirectly honoring a popular critique of King’s novel, the kids’ side is (so far) far more engaging than the adults’. But Pennywise has barely poked his red-tufted head out of the sewer, so there’s plenty of time for that storyline to start floating.
The series shows promise in its willingness to explore how institutional indifference enables supernatural evil, how trauma compounds across generations, and how children see truths that adults have trained themselves to ignore. If Welcome to Derry can maintain the tension evident in its opening sequence while deepening both storylines, it could become essential viewing for King fans and horror enthusiasts alike.
For now, it’s a solid if uneven return to Derry that suggests the worst is yet to come. And in a town where children disappear every 27 years like clockwork, that’s exactly what we’re here for.
We all float down here, after all.
