Why Stephen King's Pennywise Prequel Will Be Darker Than It
By being a prequel, Welcome to Derry will necessarily be far darker in tone than 2017’s blockbuster hit It. It is tricky for movie adaptations of Stephen King’s work to nail the unusual balance between horror, humor, and character-driven drama found in the author’s acclaimed work. The fact that Robin Williams almost played The Shining’s Jack Torrance proves that even well-regarded adaptations of King’s work can almost tread into an unintentionally comedic territory and end up losing the delicate balance that makes their source material so effective.
Set in the '60s, Welcome to Derry is set to explore Pennywise’s existence before he encounters the movie adaptation’s Losers Club in the '80s. In addition to Pennywise's origins, theIt prequel series from HBO Max will likely focus on another group of Derry residents forced to deal with the evil entity. However, viewers already know the fate of Pennywise leading into It’s two-part movie adaptation, and this could be a major problem for the prequel series.
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It’s prequel is guaranteed to be darker than the original It movies since viewers already know that Pennywise makes it out alive and his victims likely don’t. While this doesn’t necessarily mean that a Pennywise prequel series is a bad idea, it does mean that Welcome to Derry will likely be a lot less fun than its franchise predecessors. Without introducing a new set of misfit teens for Pennywise to torment and terrorize, the prequel can’t effectively recreate the tone of the original. However, if the prequel series does replace the Losers' Club, this won’t work either as, since this is a prequel, viewers would know from the jump any lovable new characters
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