It: Welcome to Derry Producers Say ‘More is More’ With Pennywise

Viewers tuning into this Sunday’s season premiere of the HBO Max series It: Welcome to Derry will see lots of ghastly sights. One thing they won’t see, however, is the thing promised by the show’s title. Pennywise is not just conspicuously absent from the first episode, but—according to early reviews—he’s missing from much of the show’s first half.

But director Andy Muschietti and producer Barbara Muschietti assure Pennywise fans that they have nothing to fear. “We did ‘less is more’ for half the show, but then we did ‘more is more,'” Andy teased in Hollywood Reporter. “The idea behind the delayed appearance is the build up of expectation. The audience doesn’t know that they want it, but I think it creates a very special feeling. When and where the clown is going to appear was a game that I wanted to play with the audience.”

For Barbara, making Pennywise more of a presence than a ghastly dancing clown fits within the rules established by the original Stephen King novel from 1986 and from the two adaptations she and Andy made, 2017’s It and 2019’s It: Chapter Two.

“Being a shape-shifter, Pennywise looms large. If you dissect the movies, Pennywise is not in the movies that much, but people feel It a lot when he is on camera,” she pointed out. “The last thing we want is to have an audience get comfortable with Pennywise. We don’t want anybody to get used to his image. He’s unpredictable. He strikes whenever he feels like it.”

King fans know that she’s right. As its pronoun suggests, the eldritch entity known only as “It” can take many different forms, and does so throughout the book and its adaptation. Sometimes it’s a giant spider, sometimes it’s a member of the victim’s family, and sometimes, as Andy pointed out to Hollywood Reporter, it’s a “collective creatures — like when he became the piranha.”

But of course, Pennywise the Dancing Clown is the being’s most famous form, and with good reason. Within the world of King’s story, the creature becomes a clown to prey on children, its preferred meal. Within our world, the clown form is best thanks to incredible performances by the actors who portray the creature, first Tim Curry in the 1990 TV miniseries and, most recently, Bill Skarsgård in the Muschietti films and in Welcome to Derry.

The fact that Pennywise preys on children also has something to do with the lack of that creature in the show. Set in 1962, Welcome to Derry follows the U.S. military’s attempts to capture the creature and turn it into a weapon which the Muschiettis see as a natural plot point. “We basically said, “OK, 1962. What’s the situation in America?” It’s the Cold War. The Cuban Missile Crisis is coming. The Derry base, as it said in the first episode, is the northernmost military base in the country,” Andy explained. “It makes a lot of sense that there was a lot of tension from that.”

Enough tension for viewers expecting a certain Dancing Clown? Maybe not at first, but the Muschiettis are certain that the most ravenous viewer will be satisfied by the end.

It: Welcome to Derry premieres on HBO Max on Sunday, October 26.