IT: Welcome to Derry Creators Discuss the Premiere Episode's 'Kick in the Balls' Ending

Major SPOILERS for the premiere episode of IT: Welcome to Derry follow. 

The first episode of HBO Max's IT: Welcome to Derry introduced viewers to a new group of kid heroes... and then said goodbye to the majority of them in a particularly surprising and brutal way. As executive producer Barbara Muschietti put it to TV Guide, this ending "sets the tone, so we don't forget for a second how unpredictable IT is." 

The core of Stephen King's novel IT and its adaptations is the bond forged by the kid protagonists, the so-called Loser's Club, and how they join together to fight the supernatural entity they call IT. Welcome to Derry functions as a prequel to the 2017 and 2019 IT movies, and as the first episode played out and a few different kids began to come together as a group in an earlier era, it felt like we were very much seeing the formation of what would be this show's version of that dynamic. But it turned out to be a cruelly clever ruse, as several of them were viciously killed by IT in the premiere's final scene. 

As co-showrunner Jason Fuchs told TV Guide, the intention was cemented early on to have the first episode end on a big and shocking note. "We always knew we wanted audiences to feel disoriented and thrown off by [the feeling of] 'Oh, my goodness, anything can happen. Characters we love might not make it...' Forget about [making it] to the end of the season, but to Episode 2! There was always this general design of how do we convey to an audience to expect the unexpected from this series?"

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Though there are several central adult characters too, on the kid side, the premiere spent quite a lot of time with 1962 Derry, Maine schoolkids Lilly (Clara Stack), Phil (Jack Malloy Legault), and Teddy (Mikkal Karim-Fidler). We went home with Teddy and his family, and he had his own horrific encounter with IT, even as Lilly was also seeing ominous things around her as well. On top of that, as the kids began to investigate the disappearance of their classmate Matty (Miles Ekhardt), Phil's little sister, Susie (Matilda Legault), joined them — seeming to signify she'd be another plucky member of their growing group as the season progressed. 

One more kid then became connected to them when Ronnie (Amanda Christine), daughter to local movie theater projectionist Hank (Stephen Rider), let them into the theater after hours and put on The Music Man, the movie Matty watched right before he vanished. And that's when all hell broke loose, with Matty himself ominously appearing in the movie leading to him unleashing the same horrific, mutated, and winged baby version of IT we saw Matty attacked by in the premiere's opening sequence. As Ronnie watched helplessly from the projection booth, all of the kids tried to run as this creature burst from the screen, only for the creature to quickly kill most of them, including pulling Teddy into the air and literally tearing him apart. Besides Ronnie, only Lilly (barely) escaped the carnage, though she ended the episode with an understandable scream of horror. 

Beyond the pilot itself giving them so much screen time, the show's marketing did its best to position Teddy, Phil, and Susie as an ongoing part of the series, including them prominently in group images and giving them all individual character posters. Andy Muschietti, who directed the two IT movies and returns as both the director of several episodes — including the pilot — and executive producer for Welcome to Derry said ending the episode in this manner was innately exciting "as part of this bigger concept of raising the volume from what the movies were." 

"We sort of presented this little subversion, which is, OK, here are the losers that you're gonna love for the rest of the season. And by the end of the [first] episode, they all die," Muschietti added. "We all agreed it was a great idea. We'll see now what people think. But I think it's that kind of kick in the balls that, for good or bad, is going to shock people and hopefully make them want to keep watching." 

Fuchs credits his fellow showrunner, Brad Caleb Kane, for being the one to suggest they outright kill off all three of the kids at the end of the pilot, recalling, "It was really Brad's contribution; one of the first contributions [he] made when we partnered on this. I'd written the pilot, and there was a brutal ending, but it was not the current ending. There were more survivors."

In the ending audiences saw, Lilly's scream begins after she realizes she's still holding the torn off, bloody hand of little Susie, who she tried in vain to pull to safety before fleeing to the theater's lobby. But Fuchs revealed that in his original scripted version, "Lilly actually lost her hand, but the other kids made it through. It was Brad who came in and sat down and said, 'I think you should kill them all.' And my first reaction was horror, because I love these characters. I created these characters! And my second reaction was, I think, based on my first reaction, 'We have to do this.' There's no other way to achieve what we're trying to achieve creatively but to do this."

Fuchs felt this ending, "sets you off on an amazing journey. It also throws you as an audience into the point of view of our characters. You know, the group of characters at the heart of this journey have not seen IT 1, they haven't seen IT 2. They don't have the benefit of reading the book. They're discovering the rules all for themselves. They're disoriented themselves. And so on an experiential level, it was a stroke of genius from Brad, because now you're really in their perspective." 

Kane was more modest and darkly humorous about this huge move he brought to the series, deadpanning, with a grin, "I don't live in Derry! I just want to see the creature thrive. And it needs to eat. It needs to feed. So we gave it some grist for the mill."

New episodes of IT: Welcome to Derry debut Sundays at 9/8c on HBO and HBO Max.