Stephen King’s Pennywise Prequel Can Avoid A Major IT Problem

screenrant.com:

While Welcome to Derry’s exploration of Pennywise’s backstory could run into story problems, the prequel to Stephen King’s IT does have an opportunity to fill in one frustrating plot hole from the source movies. Released in 2017, IT was a blockbuster success and a hit with critics to boot. An adaptation of Stephen King’s infamously ambitious, timeline-hopping bestseller of the same name, IT wisely opted to split the novel’s potentially confusing story into two distinct time periods and focus on the young characters for the first movie.

While the movie cut out some of the book’s more shocking content (including one scene that evenIT’s darker first draft didn’t go near), for the most part, IT was a remarkably close adaptation of a difficult, densely packed novel. However, IT’s limited runtime meant that the movie didn’t have time to make sense of some backstory, resulting in a few bizarre creative decisions that felt like plot holes on rewatch. Luckily, the upcoming prequel series Welcome to Derry can fill in these gaps.

Related: Stephen King’s Pennywise Prequel Should Avoid It: Chapter 2 Taboo

Welcome to Derry, as the title implies, will explore the titular town before the Losers Club’s initial encounters with Pennywise in the 80s. Although the novel and movie adaptations both imply that Pennywise curses the town, the IT movies, in particular, depict Derry as a wretched hive of scum and villainy with no redeemable characters outside of the Losers Club without ever explaining how the kids avoided becoming as loathsome as their parents, schoolmates, and fellow locals. While Welcome to Derry can’t depict Pennywise and Maturin the Turtle’s cosmic backstory since it is too ambitiously weird to be realized onscreen, the series