In recent months, filmmaker and showrunner Brad Caleb Kane has been a very busy man. Not only did he co-run the first season of It: Welcome to Derry, which just premiered last year, but he also served as the showrunner on the just-released Friday the 13th prequel series Crystal Lake and is now heading straight into active production on the second season of Welcome to Derry as the show’s now sole showrunner.
That means that Kane has been busy doing a lot of press for Crystal Lake but also seemingly fielding just as many questions about his handling of Pennywise as he does about Jason Voorhees. In a recent interview, the showrunner opened up a bit about what audiences can expect from the upcoming second season of Welcome to Derry, Pennywise’s involvement in it, and how it could differ substantially from prior entries in the It franchise.
For the uninitiated, It: Welcome to Derry is a prequel series that takes place decades prior to the events of Andy Muschietti’s It: Chapter One. That film took place in 1989 and is set during one of the titular creature’s feeding cycles, which comes around every twenty-seven years. Thus, Muschietti’s sequel, It: Chapter Two, was set twenty-seven years later, during the nefarious entity’s next feeding cycle in 2016. It: Welcome to Derry’s first season elected to wind the clocks back in the opposite direction, though, chronicling the events of its prior feeding cycle in 1962.
From the get-go, Brad Caleb Kane and his collaborators were open about ambitious plans for Welcome to Derry that would see subsequent seasons tracing the lineage even further back, though, with each new season jumping twenty-seven more years into the past. Now, with the second season gearing up for production proper, Kane is revealing more about what the second season, set in 1935, will be like.
"It’s a Warner Bros. gangster movie. It’s bank robbers and Hoovervilles and street urchins riding the rails, religious fundamentalism. And a different kind of Pennywise… Pennywise the way you’ve never seen that character before. So, it’s very exciting what we’re building, and it’s gonna be a big challenge because it’s a bigger season than season one, but we’ll see what happens."
Interestingly, Welcome to Derry is continuing to draw inspiration from King’s massive original text, It from 1986. That novel featured an interlude that told the story of the Bradley Gang, which is what most of the second season of the show seems to be anchored in. Interestingly, King’s writing also gives a hint as to exactly what Kane could be talking about in terms of a “different kind of Pennywise.” In that section of King’s novel, Pennywise is described as being "dressed in a pair of farmer’s biballs and a cotton shirt… but his face was covered with that white greasepaint they use, and he had a big red clown smile painted on."
In this way, Kane’s comments make it sound like the second season of It: Welcome to Derry will continue to incorporate new influences while also drilling even further down into the bones of King’s original source material.
Add us as a preferred source on Google