Stephen King is no longer down to clown.
Stephen King might be done with Pennywise, but the clown sure as hell aint dead yet. Speaking with the Bloody Disgusting podcast The Losers’ Club (via ScreenRant), the Maine Man had a few thoughts about how the HBO Max prequel series Welcome to Derry might turn out. While he has no personal interest in revisiting the character on his own time, he isn’t writing the idea off just yet.
After the two New Line Cinema/Warner Bros It films collectively earned around a billion dollars at the global box office, more Pennywise seemed inevitable. Welcome to Derry is said to likely explore the origin story of Pennywise the Clown while investigating the 27-year curse that envelops Derry.
Here’s what Stephen King had to say about the Pennywise HBO Max prequel series:
I think that when I die I will kind of disappear from the paperback racks. But that f*****ng clown is going to live forever. Well, I don’t have a relationship to Pennywise now. Because I have no intention of going back to IT… it’s in the hands of people who are doing this… Andy and Barbara [Muschietti] are going to do ‘Welcome to Derry,’ they’re talking about it anyway. And they’ve got sort of a handshake deal, I think, with HBO Max. It’s an interesting possibility to do that. They talked about a prequel. Which struck me as an okay idea. I’d love to see what Pennywise was up to 27 years before the ’50s. Or, I guess it would be the ’80s, because they updated the [setting]. So it would be, you know, before World War 2 or something. It’ll be interesting to see what will happen with that.
Stephen King via The Losers’ Club podcast
The original It novel told the story of a group of kids in the town of Derry, Maine who are forced to team up to defeat a very nasty supernatural clown. The group of survivors face the clown as children and then again 27 years later.
Check out the Development Hell podcast episode about Cary Fukunaga’s unmade version of the 2017 It adaptation:
Lastly, how do you feel about the world of It expanding with Welcome to Derry? Will you be checking it out once it hits HBO Max? Let me know on Twitter via @joshkorngut. I’m always around to chat all things Stephen King!
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