The writers' room is open. Andy Muschietti confirmed to Variety that It: Welcome to Derry Season 2 is actively in development, and the creative team is leaning hard into the bleakness of its new era.
The season will be set in 1935, structured around the Bradley Gang Massacre — a passage from Stephen King's original It novel in which a group of outlaws hides out in Derry while fleeing the FBI, robbing and murdering store owners along the way. It lands 27 years before Season 1, which followed a missing boy amid a Cold War military plot.
'There's gonna be a lot of that depression-era hustling in the air in our characters,' Muschietti told Variety. 'Everybody's trying to get by and survive the circumstances.' He was direct about the social texture the show won't sanitize: '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.'
That's a tonal pivot from what It fans know. The franchise built its dread on the contrast between cheerful suburban surfaces and the rot underneath — kids on bikes, white picket fences, something unspeakable in the sewer. Season 2 drops the facade entirely. 'Derry is a graveyard almost,' Muschietti says. 'It's a carcass of something because people are depleted, poor, tired, jobless, homeless. The kids don't have a suburban, comforting life.' Some of the new characters are orphans or runaways.
Still, Muschietti promises a thread of hope — and a literal family tree connecting the different timelines across the planned three-season arc. The show's structure runs backwards through time: 1962 in Season 1, 1935 in Season 2, and 1908 in a planned Season 3. The 1935 interlude in King's novel is brief, which gives co-creators Barbara Muschietti and Jason Fuchs room to expand.
Muschietti also nodded toward future King adaptations he's eyeing, singling out 'The Jaunt' — a short story from the Skeleton Crew collection — as something he'd 'love to go back to,' though he confirmed it is not a current active project.
It: Welcome to Derry Season 1 is streaming now on Max.
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Here's the thing: the most interesting creative bet Muschietti is making isn't the monster — it's the era. The Depression as a horror setting is underused precisely because the misery is already real and documented. Pennywise doesn't need to manufacture dread when the economy already did it. Whether the show can hold that tension without letting the historical weight flatten the supernatural story is the actual benchmark to watch. The demo is not the product. It ships when it ships.
