IT: Welcome To Derry Renewed For Season 2 At HBO

Pennywise ought to touch up his makeup, because "IT: Welcome to Derry" is coming back for more.

HBO has renewed the horror prequel for Season 2, TVLine has learned. The pickup comes more than eight months after the show's freshman finale aired on December 14.

Brad Caleb Kane — who served as co-showrunner on Season 1 with Jason Fuchs — will take over that role solo for the sophomore run, while siblings Andy and Barbara Muschietti will continue to executive-produce.

"We are excited to return to the chilling world of Derry and to further expand on Andy and Barbara Muschietti's horrifically iconic adaptation," Sarah Aubrey, head of original programming at HBO Max, said in a statement. "Together with Brad Caleb Kane, they will break new ground in Season 2, deepening the terror, the mystery, and the unforgettable Pennywise lore that fans love to devour."

Added the Muschiettis: "Continuing to explore and expand on the amazing world Stephen King created is an absolute privilege. The support of our partners at HBO and Warner Bros. Television is priceless. Boy do we love our jobs!"

Developed for television by Andy Muschietti (who directed the feature films "It" and "It Chapter Two"), Barbara Muschietti, and Jason Fuchs, "IT: Welcome to Derry" takes place in the same universe as the movies — Season 1 is set 27 years before the events of "It" — with Bill Skarsgård once again portraying Pennywise the Dancing Clown.

The Season 1 finale drew an even closer connection between the TV series and the films, with show character Marge Truman (Matilda Lawler) revealed to be the eventual mother of Richie Tozier (played by Finn Wolfhard in "It"). And though Pennywise was ostensibly defeated in "It Chapter Two," which released in 2019, the evil clown revealed in the "Welcome to Derry" season ender that he experiences time differently than humans, suggesting that he can travel through time to prevent his eventual demise (and may in fact be impossible to truly kill).

"At the end of the season, we understand we have a monster who doesn't experience time in a linear way, so he could potentially rewrite history," Andy Muschietti previously told TVLine. "In that way, we imply that the killing — his demise in 2016 — might be altered. So we're not going to see two more seasons of thinking It dies in 2016."

Andy added that he and his creative team have a three-season plan for "Welcome to Derry," which will correspond with three of the "Derry Interlude" chapters featured in Stephen King's novel (though there are five interludes total).

"From the genesis of this project, we had the idea to make it three seasons, aligning with the three more important catastrophic events that are described in the interludes [of the book]," he shared. "Those are the burning of the Black Spot in '62 [which was portrayed in Season 1], but then the massacre of the Bradley Gang in '35, and the explosion at the Easter egg hunt in 1908. It was always that blueprint for us."

Monday's renewal announcement confirmed that Season 2 will indeed take place in 1935, during the Great Depression, and will center on "the bloody massacre of the Bradley Gang, a group of bank robbers who stop in Derry to buy ammo and end up facing unimaginable horror," the logline teases.

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