"It: Welcome to Derry" Season 2 Will Be Set in 1935 and Won't Ignore "the Terrible Events of the Era"
According to showrunner Andy Muschietti, the new season will unfold in a Derry collapsed under the ruin of the Great Depression: a poor, jobless, hopeless town, and characters doing crazy things just to survive.
HBO"It: Welcome to Derry" is heading to 1935 for its second season — something we already knew, since Pennywise has to return to Derry every 27 years. But unlike Stephen King's original novel, which diverges on the timeline, the show's second season will have to confront the wreckage of the Great Depression head-on.
"There's going to be a lot of Depression-era desperation in our characters' air," Muschietti tells Variety. "Everyone is trying to get by, to survive the circumstances. They're going to do crazy things."
"In this situation, on the surface Derry is almost a graveyard. It's like a carcass, because people are exhausted, poor, tired, jobless, homeless. The kids don't have a suburban-comfort kind of life. They're in a very different situation," Muschietti adds. Some are orphans, some have run away from home; so the setting is pretty dark. "But there's always a flicker of hope burning, and that's exactly what keeps our new group going."
The 27-year countdown is running in reverse
The first season of "It: Welcome to Derry" is set in 1962 and follows the entity targeting the parents of some of the original Losers' Club members from the 2017 "It" film. The first film was set 27 years after season one, and the second film 27 years after the first film. Since the second film marked the end of the clown, the only way to keep telling the story is to go backward. After the second season, the third season will jump back another 27 years, to 1908, when It first took the form of a clown.
As King's works have laid out, every time It returns, a devastating event occurs. In the first film, Bill's brother Georgie was brutally murdered; the second film opened with a horrific hate crime against a tourist. In season one, the event was the destructive Black Spot fire.
Season two will focus on the Bradley Gang Massacre: the story of a gang of outlaws who descended on Derry and drenched the town in blood.
"It: Welcome to Derry" season 2 doesn't have a release date yet.