HBO’s ‘IT: Welcome to Derry’ Is Making a Major Genre Shift in Season 2

Published Sep 7, 2026, 11:28 AM EDT Shawn Van Horn is a Senior Author for Collider. He's watched way too many slasher movies over the decades, which makes him an aficionado on all things Halloween and Friday the 13th. Don't ask him to choose between Michael Myers and Jason Voorhees because he can't do it. He grew up in the 90s, when Seinfeld, Everybody Loves Raymond, and TGIF were his life, and still watches them religiously to this day. Larry David is his spirit animal. His love for entertainment spreads to the written word as well. He has written two novels and is neck deep in the querying trenches. He is also a short story maker upper and poet with a dozen publishing credits to his name. He lives in small town Ohio, where he likes to watch professional wrestling and movies. When it was first announced that Stephen King's novel It, which had already been adapted into a miniseries and two movies, was returning again as a prequel series on HBO Max, it felt like an unnecessary cash grab. Sure, Bill Skarsgård was returning, along with creatives Andy Muschietti and Barbara Muschietti, but what could be gained by having Pennywise chase a new group of kids? Despite the odds, IT: Welcome to Derry is a fun and terrifying show, one that takes its time building up to the killer clown. It also finds its reason to exist by exploring storylines only briefly mentioned in King's original novel. IT: Welcome to Derry has been confirmed to return for a second season, and when it does, the story will jump backward to an era that will turn the series into something more akin to Boardwalk Empire or Peaky Blinders. What Will 'IT: Welcome to Derry' Season 2 Be About? Pennywise, while appearing as a scary-as-hell clown, is no mortal human. Instead, the clown is merely one form taken by an extraterrestrial creature that has fed on fear for thousands of years, returning every 27 years to find more victims. Season 1 of It: Welcome to Derry takes place 27 years before the events of Muschietti's first film, in 1962, though the show's creators have had a clear plan from the beginning. In an October 2025 interview with Variety, Andy Muschietti said, “Our big story arc involves three seasons, mainly based on the three critical cycles of Pennywise, which are 1962, 1935 and 1908." As readers of the novel know, something rather different and exciting is waiting in 1935, which is teased in IT: Welcome to Derry's fantastic opening credit scenes. Now that the show has been renewed, Season 2 will focus on a group known as the Bradley Gang, which was only briefly mentioned in King's book. In the IT novel, King describes them as violent gangsters who have earned a notorious reputation in Derry, partly stemming from the murder of a banker after a robbery. That's a far cry from kids on bikes. In another interview with Variety, Muschietti emphasized that the show's time jumpwould shift the story from the Cold War to the Great Depression, with characters who will do whatever they need to survive. Although Derry has a history of darkness, the town is thriving economically for the most part in Season 1. Many families live in nice houses and want for nothing. Season 2 will strip this away in favor of poverty and uncertainty. The characters' fear will be ripe for the picking when Pennywise appears, now as a time-traveling entity seeking to destroy the ancestors of those who killed it in 1962. 'IT: Welcome to Derry' Can't Continue to Coast on Nostalgia Stephen King's IT, along with the 1990 miniseries and the 2017 movie, is entrenched in nostalgia, with a group of misfit friends riding their bikes through a small town that doesn't notice them. IT: Welcome to Derry Season 1 embraced much of the same, but for Season 2 to succeed, however, it needs to diverge from that predictable formula, or it risks turning the series into a parody of itself. Ultimately, the Bradley Gang is the big selling point in Season 2 and a source of fear initially bigger than a shapeshifting clown. 1930s gangsters in suits carrying Tommy guns and riding in Model A Fords will take IT: Welcome to Derry from coming-of-age to a more serious crime drama. Those types of shows have already found great success in creating enough tension without a clown. Throw in Pennywise, and the suspense will be unbearable. How will a group of gangsters handle an entity from another world? We won't give it away here, but King's novel does allude to how that interaction ultimately concludes. IT: Welcome to Derry's first season worked because it was unpredictable, with subplots that explored the military's desire to capture the entity and use it as a weapon, along with the mysterious object created to keep it contained in Derry. Season 2 is set to evolve again — not by moving away from what Stephen King created, but by fleshing out what he previously teased. If what comes next in IT: Welcome to Derry is a genre shift of horror meets gangster drama, viewers are in for a thrilling time.