Andy Muschietti Teases IT: WELCOME TO DERRY Season 2’s Violent 1930s Story From Stephen King’s Novel

Fans of It: Welcome to Derry know the series is digging deep into Stephen King’s original novel and pulling out the stuff that never been adapted before. Now, creator, director, and executive producer Andy Muschietti is opening the door to what’s coming next, and it sounds like Season 2 is going to take things in a grim, unexpected direction.

While the first season locks into its own corner of Derry’s twisted history, Muschietti confirmed that the follow-up will jump back in time to the 1930s and center on a lesser-known but brutal subplot from King’s book.

“It’s 1935 – we’re now working on it, and it’s so much fun,” Muschietti said during Deadline’s Contenders TV panel for the series. “For the ones of you who read the books, probably the Bradley Gang sounds familiar.

“The Bradley Gang was a gang of bank robbers that — not accidentally, but they were on their way somewhere and they stopped in Derry to buy some ammo and something horrible happens.”

That setup alone already feels like a different beast compared to the suburban terror vibe people usually associate with It. This era of Derry isn’t about kids riding bikes through quiet neighborhoods. It’s a harsher, colder, more desperate time.

Muschietti explained that this storyline has roots in real-world crime history that inspired King in the first place.

“The Bradley Gang is based on the Brady Gang, which is a real-life gang of robbers that were executed in the streets of Bangor, Maine. And now we’re not creating the event that the big paroxysm of violence in this case will be the massacre of a Bradley gang.”

This isn’t going to be just another creepy chapter. It’s shaping up to be a full-on historical nightmare filtered through Derry’s supernatural horror.

What makes this direction even more interesting and cool is how drastically the setting changes the tone of the story. Muschietti made it clear that the Depression-era backdrop flips the usual formula on its head.

“It’s fascinating because the thing that is so much fun in this stage of development is that we’re facing an era which is the Depression Era that changes dramatically the setup of things.

“There’s no suburban comfort — the trope of the kids that live in suburbia and they ride their bikes and suddenly one of them disappears is nothing like this. This is in 1935. It’s a very dire situation. People are very poor. They’re struggling to survive, so the setup will be very different.”

That shift opens the door for a darker, more grounded kind of horror, one where survival itself is already a daily battle before anything supernatural even shows up.

Muschietti also teased how this season fits into a larger long-term plan for the series, hinting at even more infamous events from Derry’s bloody past.

“There’s like three big events in Welcome to Derry Season 1 … and Season 3 would be the explosion of the Kitchener Iron Works, which is a big explosion during an Easter egg hunt where a hundred kids lost their lives. It’s always there f*cking around, so that much I can tell you.”

If you know King’s lore, that’s one of the most disturbing tragedies tied to Derry, and hearing it mentioned this early suggests the show has some serious long-game storytelling in mind.

All of this connects back to why Muschietti wanted to expand this world in the first place. Even after directing the two It films, he felt like there was still a ton of story left untouched.

“The feeling that we still had so much ground to cover. I had read this book many, many decades ago, and it was very close to me and very close to my heart. And there’s so many stories in that book that I couldn’t possibly cover in two movies.

“During the shoot of It 2,” he added, “we kept having these conversations about the possibilities of making an origin story of, how did Bob Gray become [Pennywise] the clown? How did it become Pennywise?

“Who was Bob Gray? Bob Gray is one of the big enigmas in the book that are intentionally put there to create tension and are never solved. Our idea was to just like open another window into that enigma.”

Welcome to Derry isn’t just retelling old scares. It’s peeling back layers of mystery around Pennywise and the evil that’s been haunting this town for generations.

The further back the show goes, the closer it gets to the roots of Derry’s darkness, and I can’t wait to see these stories explored!