The first season of It: Welcome to Derry did something rare for a horror prequel. It justified its own existence. Rather than simply retreading the familiar beats of the It films, the HBO series expanded the mythology of Stephen King’s fictional town, digging into the history of Pennywise and the cycles of violence that have defined Derry for generations. It was creepy, ambitious, and at times genuinely frightening in ways that caught audiences off guard. The series earned an 82% rating on Rotten Tomatoes—respectable, though arguably too low for a show that delivered some of the most unsettling horror television in recent memory.
Now the story is going back further. HBO has confirmed that It: Welcome to Derry Season 2 is in development, and the new season will take viewers to 1935, into the heart of the Great Depression, for a story that connects directly to one of the most infamous events in the town’s history: the Bradley Gang massacre.
When Does It: Welcome to Derry Season 2 Premiere?
HBO hasn’t announced an exact release date yet. What we know is that the season is coming, that it’ll follow the same weekly release model as Season 1, and that it’s set to explore a different era of Derry’s dark history. The announcement confirms the show’s ambitious structure: each season will move backward in time, tracing Pennywise’s influence across the decades. Season 1 took place in the 1960s. Season 2 will land in 1935. If the original three-season plan holds, a third season could go even further back, potentially to 1908—the year of the Ironworks explosion in King’s novel, one of the foundational tragedies of Derry.
The move to 1935 isn’t arbitrary. That year marks a key moment in Pennywise’s 27-year cycle, and it’s the setting for one of the most famous episodes in It lore: the massacre of the Bradley Gang. Readers of the novel will remember the scene—a group of bank robbers passing through Derry, expecting a routine stop, only to be met by armed townspeople who slaughter them in the street. What the townspeople don’t realize is that their murderous rage has been amplified by the ancient evil living beneath their feet. Pennywise doesn’t need to kill directly. It just needs to nudge the darkness that already exists.
What Season 2 Is About
The official HBO description is direct: “The second season will be set in 1935, during the Great Depression, and will revolve around the bloody massacre of the Bradley Gang, a gang of bank robbers who come to Derry to buy ammunition and end up facing unimaginable horror.”
The Bradley Gang was real in the world of King’s novel—a group of criminals who made the fatal mistake of stopping in a town that was already under Pennywise’s influence. The massacre that follows is one of the book’s most disturbing sequences, not because Pennywise is directly involved, but because the people of Derry do the killing themselves. They’re ordinary citizens, transformed by the town’s dark energy into a mob capable of extraordinary violence.
The car with bullet holes that was discovered in the lake during Season 1 belonged to Al Bradley, the leader of the gang. That detail connected the two seasons even before the official announcement. The car, dredged up from the water while searchers looked for missing children, was a piece of Derry’s history that had been swallowed by the town’s collective amnesia. Season 2 will show how it got there.
A Different Kind of Derry
Andy Muschietti, who directed the two It films and developed the series, has been open about the tonal shift. In an interview with Variety, he described a town that’s been hollowed out by economic collapse. “On the surface, Derry is almost a cemetery,” he said. “It is the corpse of something, because people are exhausted, they are poor, they are tired, unemployed and homeless.”
That’s a significant departure from Season 1’s 1960s setting, which had its own social tensions but still felt like a functioning community. The Derry of 1935 is desperate. The Great Depression has gutted the town’s economy. People are surviving day to day, doing things they never imagined they’d have to do. Muschietti has said the new characters will include orphans and fugitives, people who’ve been pushed to the margins and have to make impossible choices just to stay alive.
“There will be a lot of that struggle typical of the Depression era in our characters,” Muschietti said. “Everyone tries to get ahead and survive the circumstances. They are going to do extreme things.”
The hope that animated the young characters in Season 1 will still be present, according to Muschietti, but it’ll be harder to find. The kids of the 1960s had a certain innocence, even as they faced racism and homophobia and the everyday cruelties of small-town life. The characters of 1935 will have no such buffer. They’ll be born into hardship, and Pennywise’s influence will fall on already-wounded ground.
Will Pennywise Return?
Bill Skarsgård hasn’t been officially confirmed for Season 2, but it’s hard to imagine the series without him. His Pennywise was one of the defining horror performances of the past decade, and his return in Welcome to Derry Season 1 was a major selling point. Skarsgård has spoken about the character with a strange affection—the way an actor might talk about a particularly demanding role that’s become part of their identity.
“It was immediate. I know Pennywise very well,” he said. “When I get into his mental state, I feel free to improvise and do things that go with the character.”
He’s also talked about the ease with which he slips back into the role, which is its own kind of unsettling. “I’ve never had a character you could go back to so many times. It’s pretty easy to get in and out of that interpretation. It’s something strange.”
The character of Pennywise will presumably appear in some form. The massacre of the Bradley Gang is, in the novel, a direct manifestation of the town’s darkness—not necessarily the clown himself, but the influence he exerts. Whether Skarsgård appears as the clown or the series finds other ways to represent Pennywise’s presence, the entity will be there. It always is.
The Bigger Structure
Welcome to Derry was originally conceived as a three-season story, with each season moving backward in time. That structure is built into the source material. King’s novel is full of historical interludes—moments when the narrative pauses to show how Derry has always been a place where violence erupts and then gets forgotten. The town’s amnesia is part of the horror. Every 27 years or so, something terrible happens, and then the survivors forget. They build on top of the bones.
Season 2’s 1935 setting is a crucial piece of that history. The Bradley Gang massacre was one of the events that defined Derry’s reputation in the first half of the twentieth century, but by the time the 1960s roll around, it’s been largely forgotten—just another strange story old people don’t like to talk about. The series is excavating those buried stories, one decade at a time.
The first season established the rhythm: disappearances, a growing sense of dread, violence that emerges from the townspeople themselves as much as from any supernatural force. The second season will presumably follow the same pattern, but in a town that’s already half-dead. The Great Depression Derry isn’t a community that’s about to be torn apart by evil. It’s a community that’s already been broken, and Pennywise is just pouring salt in the wound.
The Wait
HBO will presumably announce more details as production progresses. Filming dates, casting news, a confirmed release window—all of it will come in time. For now, what we know is that It: Welcome to Derry Season 2 is happening, that it’s set in 1935, and that it’ll tell the story of the Bradley Gang massacre. The car in the lake will be explained. The cycle of violence will continue. And somewhere beneath Derry, the clown will be waiting. It always is.