Welcome to Derry Nearly Included This Major Character From the It Movies
Welcome to Derry almost dove into the origin of Sonia Kaspbrak — Eddie’s domineering mother — but showrunner Andy Muschietti says the fully written arc was cut for story reasons.
Turns out It: Welcome to Derry almost pulled a familiar face out of the fog: Eddie Kaspbrak's mom. Showrunner Andy Muschietti says a younger Sonia Kaspbrak was in early drafts of the series before she got cut for time. And her backstory would have been a surprisingly big swing.
What Sonia's story would have been
In a chat with Straw Hat Goofy, Muschietti explained that the team initially wrote in a young Sonia as an outsider who arrives in Derry as a reporter from Portland, working for a small paper. She shows up to cover the extremely unpopular construction of the town's giant Paul Bunyan statue, which had locals furious and protesting. Then the real Derry starts bleeding through: kids begin vanishing, and Sonia shifts her reporting to the creepier stuff. The plan was to use her to thread an origin for the Paul Bunyan statue right into the town's darker history.
Why she got cut
Muschietti says the season just could not fit one more storyline. All eight episodes were already stuffed. So Sonia's track was pulled, even though they had mapped out a full arc for her: start as a skeptic making noise about the town's rot, then slowly get swallowed by Derry's haze until she goes quiet and blends in like everybody else. And yes, that would have led to her eventually becoming the Sonia we know as Eddie's smothering mother.
"She starts as a person who wants to actively denounce what's going on, and slowly over the course of the episode, she falls into the fog, becomes a very complacent member of this community, and eventually she becomes the mother of Eddie."
It's a very process-heavy peek at how the show is building Derry's ecosystem, and honestly, a pretty sharp idea to link a loud, controversial town monument to one of the franchise's most memorable parents.
Where the show sits right now
- New episodes land Sundays at 9 p.m. ET.
- Current Rotten Tomatoes scores: 79% on the Tomatometer, 76% audience (as of now).
- Created by Andy Muschietti with Barbara Muschietti and Jason Fuchs.
- Main cast includes Taylour Paige, Jovan Adepo, James Remar, Stephen Rider, and Matilda Lawler, among others.