News It: Welcome to Derry IT: Welcome to Derry Co-Creators Explain That Shocking Episode 1 Ending Yep, that just happened. And Andy and Barbara Muschietti tell us the genesis of that decision. By Vanessa Armstrong | Published on October 26, 2025 Credit: Brooke Palmer/HBO Comment 0 Share New Share Credit: Brooke Palmer/HBO Warning! This post contains major spoilers for the first episode of IT: Welcome to Derry! If you haven’t watched it yet and plan to, bookmark this post and come back to it after you’ve finished watching and picked your jaw up off the floor! If you’ve watched the first episode of HBO’s IT: Welcome to Derry, you’ve been on quite the roller coaster ride. After that unsettling cold open, the show ends in an equally visceral way. Characters we thought we’d be spending a bunch of time with are definitely totally dead (and in pieces). It was a bold move by the writers, and an idea that was there from the start. In a panel that Reactor attended, series co-creators, siblings Andy Muschietti and Barbara Muschietti, explained how the decision to kill off kids that viewers have already become attached to became part of the story. Andy started off by saying the idea appeared in the writers’ first few meetings, though Barbara clarified that it was the first day. “First day? It was me, Barb, Jason [Fuchs], Brad [Kane], and Cord Jefferson,” explained Andy, “and someone said, ‘Why don’t we kill them all?’” Credit: Brooke Palmer/HBO That someone was writer Brad Kane, though Barbara clarified that he only wanted to kill all the adults, not the kids. “I think that Brad was responding probably to the ongoing desire to shock the audience at the beginning, just to set up the table, to give people a sense that nothing here is sacred, nothing here is safe from this evil. So that will keep you at the edge of your seat for the rest of the show, because no one is safe,” said Andy. Pulling out the rug like that was shocking, but something Andy felt was necessary. “We felt like it was a subversion that this new story needed, as part of the innovations that we wanted to bring—the raise of the volume, of intensity, that we wanted to take this story to, and this show to.” Andy took a big breath and added, “Let’s see, it’s an experiment, really, because I haven’t seen it before. I mean, we all saw, like, the Red Wedding and things, where the characters that we’re putting all our hopes on, just suddenly are massacred and disappearing. And I was like, ‘Okay, now what?’ Obviously the game here is, ‘Here’s the new Losers. Let’s fall in love with them so we can go across the journey.’ And the subversion is quite there to basically tell the audience nothing is safe, but also weird things will happen in this show, and there’s unpredictability.” New episodes of IT: Welcome to Derry premiere on HBO on Sundays. [end-mark] The post <i>IT: Welcome to Derry</i> Co-Creators Explain That Shocking Episode 1 Ending appeared first on Reactor.