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Stephen King hasn’t always been supportive of adaptations of his works that make major changes to them—Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining is the best-known example. But he’s also not unilaterally opposed to alterations; he was a fan of Cujo‘s more upbeat ending and was an even bigger fan of The Mist‘s far more devastating conclusion. Most recently, he gave a thumbs-up to the new finale of Edgar Wright’s Running Man.
And though It: Welcome to Derry is taking some liberties with one of his most beloved novels, building out a prequel for Pennywise and the Maine town terrorized by the evil clown, King gave the creators of HBO’s new series the green light.
“Well, we’re very happy, obviously, [to have] the blessing of Stephen King, who inspired this in the first place,” Andy Muschietti—an executive producer and director of several Welcome to Derry episodes; he also directed the two It feature films—said in a roundtable interview attended by io9. “[He’s] our biggest literary hero. It’s just phenomenal. That has been consistent all through this journey. He was very, very excited about this exploration, which departs so much—a lot of Welcome to Derry is taken from the book, but there’s a lot of storylines that are more of an answer to his questions. And that was like a kind of a leap of faith for us when we started this. And he was, you know, he was open and eager to see where we were going.”
Muschietti and his collaborator and sister Barbara Muschietti doubled down on that excitement in an interview with the Hollywood Reporter, noting the author didn’t take an active hand in shaping Welcome to Derry‘s story.
“Stephen didn’t approach the show like that,” Andy Muschietti explained. “He wasn’t imposing any kind of guidelines on us. I think his desire was to let us play with his toys because from the beginning, we were clear to him. We said, ‘Your book is a mystery. It’s a puzzle and left unsolved intentionally. And we’re going to create a lot of stuff to bring those enigmas, and also to fill in the gaps in the puzzle.’ Eventually, this creates a story that’s not in the book. It’s a hidden story.”
Added Barbara Muschietti, “We wanted to do a show that basically went backwards, where each season was a cycle of Pennywise and he loved that concept and gave us all the rope we needed.”
It: Welcome to Derry premieres October 26 on HBO.
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