Summary

• HBO's show Welcome to Derry will fix the timeline mistake of the It movies by setting it in the same era as Stephen King's novel, the 1960s.
• The new show will explore the origins of Pennywise and how he became a terrifying creature in the community of Derry.
• It creates a more authentic backdrop to King's original vision by capturing the cultural norms and shock factor of the 1950s, emphasizing the horrors of Pennywise's actions.

From the first glimpses of Welcome to Derry has a major Stephen King connection based on his original vision in the novel.

Beyond the setting and the rumored origin story, very little is known about the Welcome to Derry plot. Since the debut of the show is more than a year away, audiences will have to rely on trailers or released synopses to parse out the details of the highly anticipated release. However, one fact that has already been reported about the show's timeline confirms a major shift away from the setting of the two movies.

Welcome to Derry will air exclusively on HBO Max and is slated to debut in 2025.

Andy Muschietti's It Movies Changed The Decade Setting For The Losers Club

Andy Muschietti's two It movies from 2017 and 2019 bumped the events of the first story centered around the Losers Club to the late 1980s and then to 2016. This makes narrative sense for the sequel, as it puts It Chapter Two with the Losers Club as adults in the more modern era, but this setting is vastly different from the books. Filmed in 2016, Muschietti's It was riding high on the wave of hits set in the 1980s like Stranger Things and The Americans that had a nostalgic appeal to the target demographic for the movie.

What is known about Welcome to Derry confirms that the events of this show take place in the same universe as the movies, but it is set many years before those events took place. It is not known if the show will jump around in time, moving across different decades similar to the novel as well as It and It Chapter Two. The novel and movies both center around events happening 27 years apart but feature two different sets of decades.

Welcome To Derry Finally Returns It To The Same Era As The Book

In the original Stephen King novel, the events of the Losers Club as kids unfolded in the 1950s. Welcome to Derry being set in the 1960s comes close to fixing that, as it brings the origin story of Pennywise and his terror closer to the timeline of the book. Set more than two decades before 2017's It, the teaser images for Welcome to Derry prove it will not be the same Losers Club, but it corrects for the era and culture of the time. Even though the novel was published in 1986, part of the shocking nature of the events of the book was due to many cultural norms of the 1950s.

Set in Derry, Maine in 1957, the novel is set during a time of family values, uniformity, and camaraderie. That made Pennywise, the sexual overtones of the book, the actions of some of the kids, and the abuse many of them suffer that much more horrific in contrast to the setting. The two It movies are set in 1988-1989 and in 2016, when the actions of the Losers Club would be more accepted and the behavior of the adults more stigmatized. Welcome to Derry will take a Pennywise story back in time to the 1960s, which will serve as a more authentic backdrop to Stephen King's original vision.