“I think that when I die I will kind of disappear from the paperback racks. But that fucking clown is going to live forever,” Stephen King jokes in a new chat with Bloody Disgusting’s The Losers’ Club Podcast that we uploaded last week. He adds, “That’s one thing I’ve got going for me.”
So what is King’s current relationship with killer clown Pennywise, who recently came back to life on the big screen with a two-part feature film epic? Well, for starters, Pennywise will once again return in the upcoming HBO Max series “Welcome to Derry,” we had learned earlier this year. As for King’s involvement with the evil clown, he says that relationship is over.
Constant Readers have been wondering for many years now if King himself will ever be writing a sequel to IT, but it sounds like King has no desire to do anything of the sort.
“Well, I don’t have a relationship to Pennywise now,” King tells The Losers’ Club. “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.”
King continues, “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.”
“Welcome to Derry” is indeed being positioned as a prequel to Andy Muschietti’s IT movies, set to “tell the origin story of Pennywise the Clown” and the start of the 27-year curse.
Variety had reported in March, “The series will begin in the 1960s in the time leading up to the events of It: Part One, the 2017 film based on the Stephen King horror novel.”
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