The HBO series It: Welcome to Derry (2025) will be changing its horror genres for its second season. According to Screenrant, showrunner Brad Caleb Kane (Crystal Lake) will take a different approach from season one’s gore atmosphere to gangster genre.
From being a prequel to the Stephen King’s adaptations of It (2017) and It: Chapter Two (2019), the series will explore different eras through history of Derry, Maine backwards. While season one took place in 1962, the second season will set earlier in 1935. The creators had come up with the idea to going years before each season to demonstrate the shapeshifting clown Pennywise’s, played by Bill Skarsgård (It, Castle Rock), powers beyond time and the fears he uses on his victims. Season one teases on the massacre of the Bradley Gang that happened years earlier.
Kane says to Entertainment Weekly: “we’re making something very exciting for season two that I can’t talk too much about, but it’s got a different palette. It’s the Depression, it’s 1935. Beyond that, I can’t talk about it, but you can imagine a Warner Bros. gangster picture through the lens of Pennywise and Stephen King. That’s kind of what we’re doing… We’re deep into the writers’ room now. We have multiple scripts, we’ve broken more than half the story for season two, and we’re edging into pre-production. Beyond that, I think I’ll get suffocated by somebody if I tell you too much more. But, yes, we are deep into it, and it is happening. It’s very exciting. It’s very, very bloody, and it’s very different from season one.”
Co-showrunners Kane and Jason Fuchs (It: Chapter Two) had worked with the first season of Welcome to Derry. Now Kane will be sole showrunner for the development on season two. Though the franchise mostly focuses on its brutal violence for its horror genre, especially when it opened its first episode in the first season with Pennywise massacring multiple children, Kane thinks their new approach for the second season should focus on gangster lore. However, being placed in the Great Depression, gangsters in Derry will amp the violence for season two into full-tilt horror.