We knew It: Welcome to Derry was arriving in October, but now we know exactly when to start looking for red balloons in the sky and paper boats in the sewer: October 26. Andy Muschietti, Barbara Muschietti, and Jason Fuchs’ expansion of Stephen King’s haunted Maine town as seen in the recent It movies announced the news today with a suitably festive social media post:
Everyone’s dying to see IT. #ITWelcomeToDerry premieres October 26 on HBO Max.pic.twitter.com/9HqODk9P1Q
— IT: Welcome to Derry 🎈🎈 (@ITMovieOfficial) September 2, 2025
io9 got a chance to see the first 10 minutes of It: Welcome to Derry‘s premiere episode at San Diego Comic-Con, and the movie theater is a key backdrop in that opening sequence. If you look closely at the posters advertising what’s playing at the Capitol, you can see it’s The Music Man, a musical about another town with a very different kind of “trouble.” It’s much worse in Derry, where children are targeted by a demonic presence that cycles through once a generation.
It: Welcome to Derry is set in 1962, making it a prequel to the events of Andy Muschietti’s It films, drawing on flashbacks from King’s source-material novel while also expanding the characters and scope of that story. The cast includes Taylour Paige, Jovan Adepo, Chris Chalk, James Remar, Stephen Rider, Madeleine Stowe, and Rudy Mancuso—as well as Bill Skarsgård, reprising his take on Pennywise.
At SDCC, Muschietti explained the idea for the series came while the It movies were in production, with Skarsgård also offering his input.
“We always fantasized about doing the origin story, how ‘It’ becomes Pennywise, which is one of the big mysteries in the book … We loved [the idea of a] TV series because of the opportunities that gives you: a larger canvas to tell the story, more characters, more nuances, and more complicated arcs.”
It: Welcome to Derry hits HBO Max October 26. Will you be tuning in?
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