IT: Welcome to Derry Midseason Trailer Confirms Pennywise's Chilling Return and Finally Explores IT's Origins
Bruised but unbowed, the city braces for another round of nightmares.
Welcome to Derry just dropped a mid-season trailer, and yeah, it leans hard into the monster history. If you wanted more Bill Skarsgard nightmare-clown energy and a deeper dive into where this thing came from, the show is clearly about to go there.
The big swing: Pennywise before Pennywise
The series has been peeling back the layers on Derry and the creature that becomes Pennywise, and the latest footage doubles down on that. The show says this thing crashed to Earth in a meteor way before humans were around, then later started preying on the region’s Indigenous communities as their numbers grew. It’s a bold, oddly specific tweak that makes the lore feel bigger and stranger.
Meanwhile, in the present day
Over in modern Derry, the U.S. government wants to bag the creature and turn its reality-bending powers into a weapon. That setup pulls in ideas and references from all over Stephen King’s larger universe while the townsfolk try not to get swallowed by Pennywise’s growing influence. If you like the nerdy-lore side of King’s world, this is your buffet.
But how does it become the clown?
That piece is still under wraps. The show is heavily hinting that we’re going to get the step-by-step of how this entity puts on the Pennywise face, just not all at once. The mid-season trailer makes it pretty clear: the backstory chapter is opening.
How this differs from King’s novel
- Show version: the entity arrives via meteor before humans exist and later terrorizes the area’s Indigenous people.
- Book version: the creature is on Earth since roughly 1,000,000 BCE with no explicit tie to the Indigenous community in the story.
Given how much Welcome to Derry is expanding the It mythology and pulling in elements from other King books, the origin getting reworked this much isn’t exactly shocking. It’s the kind of lore remix that either clicks for you or doesn’t, but the ambition is undeniable.
When and where to watch
New episodes of It: Welcome to Derry air Sundays at 9pm PT/ET on HBO. If you’re tracking the rollout, keep an eye on the episode schedule as the season moves into its back half.