HBO’s “IT: Welcome to Derry” will show a different Pennywise (Bill Skarsgård) in season 2, according to showrunner Brad Caleb Kane. He told Deadline, in a story dated October 16th, that the new season brings “a different kind of Pennywise, Pennywise the way you’ve never seen that character before.” That is the whole promise. Kane did not say what changes, and the quote leaves plenty of room. It could mean the look, the behavior, or simply how the clown fits into a new era. Screen Rant ran the story on October 19th under a headline calling it “Officially Changing Pennywise,” which is a bigger claim than the interview supports.
The tease arrives with a new setting. Season 1 took place in 1962, and season 2 jumps back 27 years to 1935 and the Great Depression. HBO’s renewal announcement on August 17th described a story about the Bradley Gang massacre, with a group of bank robbers who stop in Derry to buy ammo and face unimaginable horror. Kane called it “a Warner Bros. gangster movie,” and he said it is “a bigger season than Season 1.” He also called that “a big challenge.” Warning beyond this point there are spoilers for season 1 of “IT: Welcome to Derry”.
Kane did not say what changes, and the quote leaves plenty of room.”
Two days earlier, Kane used very different words. In an exclusive for the New York Post, dated October 14th, he described season 2 as “New kids, new characters, maybe some old characters, and the same old Pennywise.” The same piece had him teasing a season that is “as terrifying” as the first, “if not more.” The two interviews do not have to clash. A clown who looks and acts the same can still be used in a way viewers have not seen. But “same old” and “a different kind of” are not the same message, and neither interview explains the difference.
That leaves a lot unconfirmed. HBO’s renewal announcement promised to “break new ground in season two, deepening the terror, the mystery, and the unforgettable Pennywise lore that fans love to devour,” in the words of HBO Max programming head Sarah Aubrey, yet it named no change to the character itself. Deadline’s story identifies the clown as Skarsgård’s, but Kane’s quoted words never say whether he is back for the new episodes. Variety reported in August that casting for season 2 had not been announced. Kane did say that Andy Muschietti is “out there casting,” and that the scripts are “about halfway through the writing.”
Kane is now running the show alone. HBO renewed the series on August 17th, and he takes over sole showrunner duties from Jason Fuchs, his season 1 partner. Deadline says season 1’s finale drew a series-high 6.5 million U.S. users in its first three days. Kane has plenty else on his plate as well. “Crystal Lake,” his Friday the 13th prequel about Jason Voorhees and his mother Pam (Linda Cardellini), is already streaming on Peacock. He is running two horror prequels at once.
The new kids will not look like the old ones, either. Muschietti told Variety in August that season 2 trades suburban comfort for a bleaker Derry, one where “Some of them are orphans or runaways, and so the environment is pretty bleak.” Screen Rant, for its part, argues that season 1 gave Bill Skarsgård’s Bob Gray a sympathetic backstory before his assimilation by the creature, which it says lets Kane and the Muschiettis “fully unleash the killer clown.” That is Screen Rant’s reading, not anything Kane has said.
Nothing about timing is settled. HBO has not announced a premiere date for season 2. Kane told the Post that shooting starts “in the summer of next year,” and ComingSoon.net used that to estimate a premiere in late 2027 or sometime in 2028. Parade expects 2027, while Screen Rant figures on early 2028. All three are outside guesses, not HBO’s word, and they do not agree. A summer shoot, a long post-production run for the effects and a season Kane calls bigger than the last all point toward a wait, whatever the exact date turns out to be.
Skarsgård’s own comments on the role are older and do not address a return for season 2. JoBlo reported in January on a Screen Rant interview in which he said he had been reluctant to sign on for the series, worried that it might be an attempt to “milk this one out with a TV show.” In that interview, looking back on season 1, he said “we explored some parts of Pennywise that we hadn’t seen before or hadn’t done.” ComicBook.com, for its part, read Kane’s “the same old Pennywise” as a sign that he is back, noting there was a question about his return before season 1 and that he did not appear until the fifth episode. That is the outlet’s inference, not a casting announcement.
Season 1’s ending explains why the clown matters to the new setting. Deadline reported in December that the kids plant the last pillar and put IT to sleep for another 27 years, but that the finale also reveals Marge will one day have a son, Richie Tozier. Per Deadline, she learns from Pennywise that the boy will bring about the monster’s downfall, and that the creature is on a journey through time, intending to stop those events from ever occurring. Deadline suggested Pennywise may go after the ancestors of the Losers in 1935. Muschietti told the outlet the idea came from King’s book, and that “The pitch to Stephen King was we’re going to tell a story backwards, and it has to do with that hint.”
Kane did not say which “old characters” he meant, but Muschietti gave Deadline one concrete lead. In Deadline’s account of the finale, Bob Gray’s daughter Ingrid (Madeleine Stowe) turns up in the Marsh home in the moments after Beverly’s mother dies and tells the girl that no one in Derry ever really dies. Muschietti said “we are going to know more about Ingrid, because Ingrid was around in the 30s.” He called her a character who is “a victim, but she’s a perpetrator too,” and said there is “much more” to explore about Bob Gray in what he hopes will be a three-season arc. ComicBook.com names Ingrid as a likely return, but that is its guess.
Muschietti has also said the darker side of the era will be part of the story. Variety quoted him in August saying “There’s gonna be a lot of that depression-era hustling in the air in our characters,” and that the era’s “social, cultural, horrible things” would stay in the story: “We’re not going to skip those.” In the same Variety interview he described Derry on the surface as “a graveyard almost,” with hope “always there, burning,” keeping the new group going. Variety added that he told it a writers’ room had opened before the renewal was official, and that he had earlier laid out a three-season plan that includes an additional chapter set in 1908.
HBO’s own renewal copy was less specific. Deadline, which reported on August 17th that the move had been expected for some time with HBO “simply waiting on the creative take” for season 2, quoted Warner Bros. Television’s Clancy Collins White promising a “spine-tingling new journey into the 1930s.” In the same Deadline report the Muschiettis said, for their part, “Boy do we love our jobs!” None of those statements mentions a change to Pennywise. Deadline’s December report added that the finale’s 6.5 million was a 12 percent lift over the episode before it, according to Warner Bros. Discovery.
What Do You Think? Does “a different kind of Pennywise” mean a new look, a new way of hunting, or just a new era around the same clown? Is “the same old Pennywise” what you want from a Depression-era Derry, or should Kane push further? And how much of the monster do you want to see in a season built around bank robbers and runaways?
See you on the next binge!
