Barbara Muschietti Unveils the Chilling Secret Linking Stephen King and George R. R. Martin

Spoiler alert for It: Welcome to Derry episode 1. If you have not watched the premiere yet, maybe circle back after you do. I am about to talk openly about who lives, who dies, and the gnarly new shape Pennywise takes.

The new HBO series spun out of Stephen King’s It landed yesterday, October 23, on HBO and HBO Max, and the show wastes zero time making a point: nobody is safe. Co-creator Barbara Muschietti even gave the premiere’s body count a very specific comparison.

"We love it. It’s our Red Wedding."

What goes down in the premiere

Episode 1 opens on young Matty (Miles Ekhardt) trying to get out of Derry, only to cross paths with It, which shows up disguised as a friendly family. Four years later, Matty’s friends decide to dig into what happened: Lilly (Clara Stack), Ronnie (Amanda Christine), Phil (Jack Molloy Legault), Teddy (Mikkal Karim-Fidler), and Susie (Matilda Legault). By the final scene, only Lilly and Ronnie are still breathing. It’s a nasty bit of table-setting that lets you know the show is here to hurt you.

Barbara Muschietti, who created the series with her brother Andy and Jason Fuchs, says that rug-pull was deliberate. The idea was to boot viewers into that uncomfortable King-ian headspace right away: think you’ve met the new Losers’ Club? Joke’s on you. That group is mostly dead by credits.

This was not the original plan

Here’s the twisty part: those shocking deaths were not in the first draft of the pilot. King’s novel kicks off with Georgie Denbrough’s quick, brutal death (and the 2017 movie kept that intact), but the earliest version of Derry’s pilot actually let all five of the kids make it out alive.

That changed in a tight little writers’ room with Fuchs, Brad Caleb Kane, and the Muschietti siblings. Fuchs remembers pitching the massacre and, mid-pitch, Andy literally standing up and dropping a sheet of paper to reveal headshots of another set of kids underneath. The goal was simple: if they could shock the writers in the room, they could shock viewers at home. HBO, to the team’s surprise, did not push back on the idea.

Pennywise gets a new nightmare shape

The creative team also cooked up a 'mutant baby' variation of Pennywise, a design swing pulled from 1960s radiation paranoia and broader social anxieties of that era. It’s a weird, specific choice, and it fits the show’s appetite for big, unsettling imagery.

Episode 2 is dropping early (yes, for Halloween)

To mark Halloween, HBO is bumping up the streaming release of episode 2 by three days on HBO Max. The linear HBO airing sticks to the usual Sunday slot. Here’s when to watch:

• HBO Max: Friday, October 31, 2025 at 12:00 a.m. PT / 3:00 a.m. ET
• HBO: Sunday, November 2, 2025 at 9:00 p.m. ET/PT

After that, new episodes roll out Sundays through the season finale on December 14.

Bottom line: the premiere makes its intentions crystal clear. The show is channeling both King’s anything-can-happen energy and the ruthless shock tactics you might associate with, well, that other fantasy author. If episode 1 made your jaw drop, the early Halloween drop for episode 2 is basically daring you to come back for more.