Andy Muschietti: ‘IT: Welcome to Derry’ S2 pulls From a Lesser-Known Stephen King Subplot

As part of Deadline’s Contenders TV panel, director and producer Andy Muschietti revealed that the story for the second season of IT: Welcome to Derry was pulled from a small subplot in Stephen King’s original 1986 IT novel.

“It’s 1935 – we’re now working on it, and it’s so much fun,” Muschietti revealed, noting that they’re taking the story back even further in time.

“For the ones of you who read the books, probably the Bradley Gang sounds familiar. The Bradley Gang was a gang of bank robbers that — not accidentally, but they were on their way somewhere and they stopped in Derry to buy some ammo and something horrible happens.”

Deadline notes that King himself took inspiration from a ’30s-era true-crime incident in his Maine home base. “The Bradley Gang is based on the Brady Gang, which is a real-life gang of robbers that were executed in the streets of Bangor, Maine,” said Muschietti. “And now we’re not creating the event that the big paroxysm of violence in this case will be the massacre of a Bradley gang.”

He added: “There’s like three big events in Welcome to Derry Season 1 … and Season 3 would be the explosion of the Kitchener Iron Works, which is a big explosion during an Easter egg hunt where a hundred kids lost their lives. It’s always there f*cking around, so that much I can tell you.”

He elaborated, talking about the rife social commentary: “It’s fascinating because the thing that is so much fun in this stage of development is that we’re facing an era which is the Depression Era that changes dramatically the setup of things. There’s no suburban comfort — the trope of the kids that live in suburbia and they ride their bikes and suddenly one of them disappears is nothing like this. This is in 1935. It’s a very dire situation. People are very poor. They’re struggling to survive, so the setup will be very different.”

Watch the full panel here.