MOVIE NEWS – Given the success of the two It films, HBO Max decided to make a prequel adaptation of Stephen King’s novel, titled Welcome to Derry, which will supposedly show the younger Pennywise the Clown.

According to Variety, HBO Max is planning to make a prequel series set before the events of the It films. Welcome to Derry will take us to the 1960s, showing the origins of Pennywise the Clown. Andy Muschietti, the director of the two It films (2017 and 2019), will be the executive producer for Welcome to Derry, alongside Barbara Muschietti and Jason Fuchs. Fuchs and Muschietti will work together on the story and the script, and it seems that the prequel will be a Warner Bros. production.

Pennywise the Clown will be the focus of the series as it will create an origin story for him. That raises the question of whether Bill Skarsgård will appear in the show or not. Neither HBO Max nor Warner Bros. has commented on this yet, but fans of the franchise sort of expect him to return to the King universe.

It was originally conceived as a horror novel by Stephen King in 1986. The story was famously adapted into a television miniseries for ABC in 1990 by director Tommy Lee Wallace, who co-wrote the adaptation with Lawrence D. Cohen. An acclaimed adaptation, the miniseries featured Tim Curry in one of the veteran actor’s most popular roles as Pennywise the Clown. It is still widely regarded as one of the more revered King adaptations.

Stephen King wrote the original novel in 1986, which received a television miniseries adaptation in 1990 (directed by Tommy Lee Wallace), which featured Tim Curry as Pennywise the Clown. The miniseries was a huge success, so Andy Muschietti didn’t have an easy job when he started working on a film adaptation of It in 2017. However, both It: Chapter One and It: Chapter Two became tremendous successes; therefore, there is room for expanding Stephen King’s universe in Muschietti’s works. Gary Dauberman, the scriptwriter, believes that there is still a lot of material in the novel which could be covered in a new adaptation:

“I do think it’s possible,” – Dauberman said to Comic book Movie. “Anything in the Stephen King Universe interests me but there’s only so much of the story we could tell in the two movies. There are definitely elements of the novel you could expand on and make its own movie. It’s just a question of whether or not people want to see it but I do think It was on this planet for a very, very, very long time and that’s a lot of bloodshed and a lot of stories to tell and I think you could do that for sure.”

Source: Movie Web