The hit horror prequel It: Welcome to Derry has landed on HBO Max and is dominating the charts, even beating its acclaimed film predecessors in viewership. While the show explores the earlier horrors of Pennywise in 1960s Derry, its success reveals a major strategic win for its creators that even Netflix’s cultural giant Stranger Things never managed to achieve.
The Current Streaming Dominance of Welcome to Derry
It: Welcome to Derry launched on October 26, 2025, on HBO Max. Since its debut, the series has held the platform’s number one spot. This success has created a powerful streaming event. The prequel’s popularity has directly boosted viewership for the original films. The 2017 movie It recently climbed to be the number two movie on HBO Max in the United States. Its sequel, It: Chapter Two, also saw a significant increase in streams, reaching the number six spot. This interconnected success across three pieces of content—two movies and a series—is a coordinated victory.
The It duology likely owes its continued dominance on HBO Max’s Top 10 Movies charts around the world to Welcome to Derry.
This effect shows a level of brand synergy that keeps the entire franchise relevant and watched, years after the main story concluded.
The Core Cast Returning to Pennywise’s World
A key element behind this seamless connection is the return of the original film’s creative team and star. Bill Skarsgård reprises his iconic and terrifying role as Pennywise the Dancing Clown. The series is set in 1962, which is 27 years before the events of the 2017 It movie. It follows a couple and their son who move to Derry just as a young boy vanishes, triggering a new wave of evil in the town.
The cast also includes Taylour Paige, Jovan Adepo, and Chris Chalk. More importantly, director Andy Muschietti, who helmed both It and It: Chapter Two, is creatively involved in the prequel. This continuity ensures the series feels like an authentic part of the same cinematic world, encouraging fans of the movies to immediately watch the show.
Where Stranger Things Took a Different Path
The success of Welcome to Derry highlights a different approach compared to Stranger Things. While both are major horror-themed properties rooted in small-town mysteries and 20th-century nostalgia, their expansion strategies differ. Stranger Things has remained a single, core television series. Its story has expanded through additional seasons, with the third season releasing in July 2019, but it has not spawned direct cinematic offshoots or prequels set in its world.
The It franchise, however, built its audience first through two massively successful feature films. The first It movie, released in 2017, earned over $704 million globally, making it the highest-grossing Stephen King adaptation ever. It: Chapter Two followed in 2019, earning $473.1 million worldwide. This established a huge built-in audience in cinemas before the story ever moved to television with Welcome to Derry. The prequel series is now effectively feeding viewers back to those original hits on streaming, creating a continuous loop of engagement.
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The Business Strategy Behind the Scares
This model represents a calculated business and creative strategy. By launching with blockbuster films, the It franchise captured a wide, global audience and generated significant revenue upfront. The transition to a streaming series acts as a new chapter that does not require reintroducing the concept or the villain. Fans already know and fear Pennywise. The series deepens the lore, exploring the “interlude chapters” from Stephen King’s original novel.
The result is a franchise ecosystem where each part supports the others. A viewer who enjoys Welcome to Derry can instantly watch the two main films on the same platform. Someone revisiting the films might be drawn to the new series to learn about Pennywise’s earlier reign of terror. This keeps the entire property active in the cultural conversation far beyond the release cycle of a single movie or season. It is a lesson in long-term franchise building that leverages multiple formats—cinema and streaming—to maintain powerful momentum.
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