Welcome to Derry Episode 4 Finally Fixes It Chapter Two’s Biggest Misstep

IT: Chapter Two caught a lot of heat for how it handled the big book-only stuff, especially the Ritual of Chud. The new HBO Max prequel series, IT: Welcome to Derry, finally takes that knot of lore and actually untangles it. By Episode 4, the show digs into Pennywise’s beginnings and walks us through the ritual in a way the movie never did.

What Chapter Two bungled (and why it mattered)

• The Ritual of Chud got the cliff-notes treatment. In Stephen King’s book, it is the way to beat Pennywise. The film glossed over it, which undercut a pivotal piece of the mythology.
• The movie’s version tied the ritual to a new fetch-quest where the Losers grab childhood totems. That add-on stretched the runtime, diluted the ritual’s weight, and, in the end, didn’t even matter because the ritual fails anyway.
• The Shokopiwah tribe’s involvement was presented with some stereotypical touches and a fuzzy process, which didn’t help.
• Pennywise’s cat-and-mouse scares were basically dropped. Without that slow-burn dread, he played more like a comic-book baddie the team had to physically take down.
• The adult Losers lacked the emotional depth that’s a core theme in the novel, so the stakes never hit as hard as they should have.

All of that added up to a sequel that felt flatter and less frightening than the 2017 film, which had set a high bar.

How Welcome to Derry fixes it

Andy Muschietti is back shepherding the story on the series side, and you can feel the difference. The show is taking its time. Episode 4 doesn’t just nod at the mythology; it expands it. We get more context on what Pennywise is and where it comes from, plus a clear, workable explanation of the Ritual of Chud - and the series actually puts it into practice. It’s the kind of in-the-weeds lore the movie didn’t have space (or patience) for.

Also smart: the series hasn’t fully unleashed Pennywise yet. It is leaning into anticipation, which is ramping the tension instead of burning it off with quick payoffs. Judging by the early public and critical response, giving this story room to breathe was the move.

This probably should have been TV all along

King’s storytelling thrives on detail and momentum. Try to compress that into a 2-to-3-hour movie and you lose the texture, the weirdness, the precision. Welcome to Derry is proving that more time and information make this world click. Honestly, if IT had started as a series, we might have avoided a lot of the friction from Chapter Two.

Quick Chapter Two refresher

IT: Chapter Two was directed by Andy Muschietti and starred James McAvoy, Jessica Chastain, Bill Hader, and Isaiah Mustafa. It pulled in $473 million at the box office and sits at 62% with critics and 78% with audiences on Rotten Tomatoes.

IT: Welcome to Derry and IT: Chapter Two are streaming on HBO Max in the US.