For most of the running time of the series premiere of IT: Welcome to Derry on HBO, you know how this all is going to go. Spoilers for “The Pilot” past this point but the premiere shows us a bunch of kids discovering there’s a malevolent entity plaguing the town of Derry, band together, and stop it… Right? Well, wrong, because in a final scene twist worthy of Pennywise the Dancing Clown (Bill Skårsgard) himself… The kids die.
It’s a wild twist that completely changes what is otherwise a by-the-numbers premiere. And it’s not quite enough to save what is otherwise (mostly) a dud, which we’ll get to a second. But at least for this viewer, it got me like Kombucha Girl, annoyed, bored and grossed out for most of the episode, until that last moment made me go, “hm, but maybe?”
To recap the IT: Welcome To Derry premiere more specifically, things start off early with a scene that echoes the death of Georgie in the original IT. We follow Matty (Miles Ekhardt), a kid who is desperately trying to leave Derry. Unfortunately for him, he gets picked up by a seemingly nice family who is, though it’s not explicitly stated, a fear-based aspect of Pennywise, the creature who has plagued Derry for generations, waking every 27 years to feast on its young. We watch as the “mom” graphically gives birth to a baby-headed bat creature, which terrorizes Matty. And though we don’t see it happen, exactly, Matty is killed — or at least taken back to Pennywise’s lair to float, as the clown is wont to do.
The rest of the premiere follows a group of kids in town loosely connected to Matty who are also attacked by Pennywise, who likes to scare his victims to sweeten up their flesh before he consumes them. Those kids include the daughter of the town’s projectionist Ronnie (Amanda Christine), Phil (Jack Molloy Legault), his sister Susie (Matilda Legault), Lilly (Clara Stack), and Teddy Uris (Mikkal Karim-Fidler). On the last, you know he’s going to be okay because he’s clearly the ancestor of Stanley Uris, one of the members of the Losers Club, who eventually defeat Pennywise in two time periods in IT.
Oops. While the gang gathers together to try and find where Matty has been taken, they decide to watch The Music Man, which they heard music from and was the last movie Matty saw while alive. So they head to the Derry movie theater, and Ronnie spools up the film. There, they’re surprised to see Matty inside the movie, which of course is more of Pennywise playing tricks on them — and just to note, Pennywise as played by Skårsgard shows up exactly zero (0) times in the premiere.
Instead, we get that bat baby monster showing up out of the movie and terrorizing the children. This, of course, plays on the fears everyone had in the 1960s of bat baby creatures ripping their kids to shreds (I’m kidding). Anyway, the bat baby attacks the kids and proceeds to kill everyone except Ronnie and Lilly. The episode ends with a blood-spattered Lilly coming to the lobby, holding Susie’s severed arm, and screaming.
To take a strong stance, I do not condone child murder. But at the same time, this ending is a neat way of telling the audience that they’re not going to be watching the same story they’ve already read in a book, and watched at least once or twice on screen (in the 1990 and 2017 versions of IT). Here, anyone can die at any moment. You thought you were watching Losers Club 1962? Buddy, you thought wrong!
…Except, two things about this. The first is that they did not need an entire hour featuring the same, repetitive scares broken up “hey, there’s a weird finger in my drain” structure for every kid which we did already see before to make this point. Even if you only take into account IT (2017) and IT Chapter Two, which this show is a direct prequel to… We’ve seen it all. A lot. So get to it quicker.
The second thing, and this is getting into future spoilers: they do the whole Losers Club 1962 thing anyway, it just involves different kids and takes longer. While this could have been a bold twist that pushed the show in surprising and unexpected directions, the series backs off that twist over at least the course of the next four episodes which were provided for critics. Maybe it twists again (like we did last summer) in the final three. But there’s only so many times you can pull out the tablecloth before the glasses and plates shatter on the floor.
Ultimately, killing Phil, Susie, and Teddy (side-note: Stanley’s dad is named Donald, so die-hard Stephen King fans likely saw this twist coming) is a big, shocking way to end an episode. That’s good! But as for how it plays out in the show beyond this… Well, it’s mostly a bummer for those kid actors, who only got to be Losers Club ’62 for the space of a few minutes of screen-time.
IT: Welcome To Derry Premiere Dates And Episode Guide:
New episodes of IT: Welcome To Derry premiere on Sundays on HBO and HBO Max at 9pm ET.
Here’s the full list of episodes in IT: Welcome to Derry Season 1 with premiere dates:
- Sunday, October 26, 2025: IT: Welcome To Derry, Season 1, Episode 1
- Sunday, November 2, 2025: IT: Welcome To Derry, Season 1, Episode 2
- Sunday, November 9, 2025: IT: Welcome To Derry, Season 1, Episode 3
- Sunday, November 16, 2025: IT: Welcome To Derry, Season 1, Episode 4
- Sunday, November 23, 2025: IT: Welcome To Derry, Season 1, Episode 5
- Sunday, November 30, 2025: IT: Welcome To Derry, Season 1, Episode 6
- Sunday, December 7, 2025: IT: Welcome To Derry, Season 1, Episode 7
- Sunday, December 14, 2025: IT: Welcome To Derry, Season 1, Episode 8 *Season Finale*
Where To Watch IT: Welcome To Derry
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