IT: Welcome to Derry

IT: Welcome to Derry opens strong but quickly sinks into uneven pacing, weak dialogue, and an overcrowded mess of underdeveloped characters and subplots.
910951
Starring
Bill Skarsgård, Joshua Odjick, Mikkal Karim Fidler
Creators
Jason Fuchs, Andy Muschietti, Barbara Muschietti
Rating
TV-MA
Genre
Drama, Horror
Release date
Oct 26, 2025
Where to watch
HBO MAX
Overall Score
Rating Overview
Story/Plot/Script
Visuals/Cinematography
Performance
Direction
Non-Wokeness
Rating Summary

In the shadowed streets of Derry, Maine, where the Kenduskeag River whispers secrets through rusted storm drains, a small-town hardware store owner unearths a forgotten ledger from 1908, its pages etched with names of children who vanished under harvest moons. As autumn leaves crunch underfoot and the annual Canal Days Festival lights up the midway, whispers of a clown-suited figure in silver bells draw a ragtag crew of misfits—each scarred by the town’s buried sins—into a web of recurring cycles, where balloons float like omens and the air thickens with the scent of popcorn laced with something sharper. It: Welcome to Derry unspools the fog-shrouded history that birthed the eternal dance between fear and the forgotten, one Derry dawn at a time.

IT: Welcome to Derry REVIEW

The highly anticipated prequel series to the IT reboot has finally arrived on HBO MAX, diving into the cursed town of Derry, Maine, 27 years before the events of the 2017 film. Directed by co-creator and reboot director Andy Muschietti, the series attempts to recapture the dark magic of the critically praised retelling of Stephen King's classic novel.

Shining most brightly are the pilot's bookends. The opening sequence—more like a tight 15-minute short film in its own right—escalates the incongruity of 1940s Americana meeting the twisted mind of Stephen King, while the closing sequence delivers the ghoulishly subverted expectations and unpredictability that fans of the genre love.

However, between those events, IT: Welcome to Derry shambles along. An overstuffed ensemble with far too many competing subplots and themes creates a disjointed, underdeveloped feel. The dialogue, too, is rather weightless, and its young cast often comes across as stilted and uncomfortable.

With seven more episodes to go, the series has time to tighten its focus, but you might want to lower those expectations and brace yourself as Muchietti and crew find their footing.

 

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James Carrick is a passionate film enthusiast with a degree in theater and philosophy. James approaches dramatic criticism from a philosophic foundation grounded in aesthetics and ethics, offering insight and analysis that reveals layers of cinematic narrative with a touch of irreverence and a dash of snark.

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  1. PurpleSanz October 27, 2025 at

    Well, OF COURSE!!! Make the black characters nice, smart and capable, and the white characters either dumb or evil! Make the males die and the women survive and become the main characters! Female empowerment! *facepalm* Make sure racism is clearly portrayed! Make the Jewish close-minded and evil too (this doesn’t bother me that much, to be honest, just made me roll my eyes)! Oh, oh, and show how disgusting meat eaters are! Oh, and of course, make a baby in the womb a fully evil thing and portray childbirth as something disgusting and evil too! Don’t even bother about making the product even 5 % scary, just follow the agenda, that’s all that matters.

    Man, and I thought this would be great, especially since it wasn’t produced by Netflix. Boy, was I wrong!

    58
    1
    1. PurpleSanz October 31, 2025 at

      Well, I watched episode 2 and they should rename the show to “Welcome To Detroit: The Clam Bake”.

      It’s just more of the same: racism, racism, racism! Black characters are either sooo smart, fearless, capable, experts, heroines without capes, or just plain victims of the evil white man!! Wow, subtle! White characters are, of course, either cowards, racists, deceivers, plain annoying, or they just don’t give a damn.

      Whenever you catch a break from all that, then it’s all about women, women, women! Women who are wise, women who speak up, women who get intimidated, women who got sexually abused by a man, women who (OF COURSE) died in childbirth—because, remember, childbirth is EVIL and abortion is the answer!

      The intro is also lame, and there’s barely anything remotely scary or thrilling.

      LGBTQ crap is the only thing surprisingly missing, and I assume it will be introduced (more like forced) very soon to the show. I am not gonna stick around to see it, though. I’m done with this shit.

      47
      1
    2. Pennywise December 22, 2025 at

      Yep, utter garbage, and only slight positives are some [only some] themes from the book …

  2. Rob November 3, 2025 at

    I agree I keep hoping there will be a legit organic scary series but they all feel compelled to woke it up

  3. Rob November 3, 2025 at

    I knew it was it doomed when I saw that Stephen King wholeheartedly endorsed it being the woke nutjob he has become

    17
  4. Plurm November 6, 2025 at

    “White people bad”. “Black people super smart, fearless and interesting”. “Don’t trust white people, they’re all bad, even the ones you like stab you in the back”.

    Not exactly subtle.

    19
  5. Parker Philips November 16, 2025 at

    Woke as ####. Replace the white bait and switch cast with a Hispanic kid and 2 blax and the only white kid is a weirdo moron. Than have a all powerful magical negro army man lol what a woke joke.

    10
  6. Antiwokist November 24, 2025 at

    Extreme wokism. Anti-white racism and misandry all time. Can they just stop agenda and propaganda for 2 minutes?

    10
  7. TiredFromWokeness January 11, 2026 at

    3 minutes. They can’t give us 3 minutes in episode one without woke lessons “white people bad, black peple good”

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This prevents two square // outputs or mismatched gallery states in the Share Options window. built = await buildShareImage(row, { force:true }); builtSquare = await buildShareSquareImage(row, built.cycle_image_url || '', built.poster_url || '', { force:true }); if (!built || !built.image_url) { throw new Error('Landscape share build failed.'); } if (!builtSquare || !builtSquare.image_url) { throw new Error('Square share build failed.'); } } else { built = await buildShareImage(row); } var shareUrl = built.share_url; var postUrl = (row.getAttribute('data-post-url') || '').trim() || shareUrl; var postTitle = (row.getAttribute('data-post-title') || '').trim(); if (!postTitle) postTitle = 'this'; var shareKind = (row.getAttribute('data-share-kind') || 'critics').trim().toLowerCase(); var upperTitle = postTitle.toUpperCase(); var lineTwo = (shareKind === 'audience' || shareKind === 'audience-teaser' || shareKind === 'audience-question') ? 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'Audience share options' : ((shareKind === 'ratings' || shareKind === 'ratings-admin' || shareKind === 'ratings-question') ? 'Ratings share options' : 'Critic share options'); window.__wiowLastShareOptionsContext = { row: row, heading: heading, win: previewWin }; var shown = renderShareOptionsWindow(previewWin, built.image_url, (builtSquare ? builtSquare.image_url : ''), shareUrl, heading); if (!shown) { var copied = false; if (navigator.clipboard && window.isSecureContext && navigator.clipboard.writeText){ try { await navigator.clipboard.writeText(shareUrl); copied = true; } catch (copyErr) {} } if (!copied) { var ta = document.createElement('textarea'); ta.value = shareUrl; ta.setAttribute('readonly', 'readonly'); ta.style.position = 'fixed'; ta.style.opacity = '0'; document.body.appendChild(ta); ta.focus(); ta.select(); ta.setSelectionRange(0, ta.value.length); copied = !!document.execCommand('copy'); ta.remove(); } } } if (statusEl) statusEl.textContent = (platform === 'copy') ? 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