Any constant reader worth their salt knows that most of Stephen King’s stories have a bit of connectivity to something else that he’s written. Though the feature films in the IT franchise never quite got there, the upcoming prequel TV series has already confirmed it’s straying into crossover territory. It was previously confirmed that HBO’s IT: Welcome to Derry will include some major King references, with a tease connecting it to The Shawshank Redemption and even King’s The Shining, but the new trailer just dropped another hint for fans. If it pans out, this could very well be the most deadly Stephen King crossover.
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Tucked in-between all the screaming to be found in the full trailer for IT: Welcome to Derry, is one surprise moment. A shot of the town of Derry encompassed in a thick, eerie fog that rolls in unimpeded by the populace or the buildings of the area. Before this moment, there was no explicit reference that connected IT and one of Stephen King’s other terrifying stories, The Mist, but now it seems like the two are becoming intertwined. Is that possible? And how can the threats from that story interact with Pennywise?
Did IT Just Tease The Mist Is canon too?
As if the sequence above alone wasn’t enough to make your brain connect both IT and The Mist together, there’s another major element of the new HBO series that could be alluding to this crossover. A huge piece of the plot for IT: Welcome to Derry is about the Hanlon family moving to the town. Leeroy Hanlon, grandfather to the Mike Hanlon seen in the two feature films, is shown as a member of the US Air Force who is working alongside other military officials on…something in the town. The trailer teases other secret elements clearly happening under the military’s eyes, delivering some pretty strong anecdotal evidence that the connection to The Mist isn’t entirely meaningless.
Fans of The Mist know that the titular phenomenon rolls into town and brings a slew of monsters with it after the military experiment called the Arrowhead Project brings them into our universe. Though the setting of The Mist is in a different town from IT (The Mist is set in Bridgton, Maine), it’s not a stretch to the see the connection. However, the potential also exists that this big scary mist is simply Pennywise flexing his reality altering powers on a massive scale. If it IS in fact a real crossover, and the monsters of The Mist are rolling into town, they likely wouldn’t bother Pennywise in the slightest, they’d just make his job easier.
IT: Welcome to Derry Could Deliver A Stephen King Universe on TV
Some of the other notable King books with IT connections that have never been seen in the many adaptations include Christine, Dreamcatcher, 11/22/63, The Dead Zone, and, of course, The Dark Tower. It’s one thing for IT: Welcome to Derry to tease the connectivity that the original story has to some of Stephen King’s other properties, but it’s another for it to be a focal point of the marketing campaign in a major way. Yes, King’s original book does include teases to the likes of Shawshank State Prison and even includes The Shining‘s Dick Halloran (two things glimpsed in the trailers in major ways) but even more exist, and the future of IT: Welcome to Derry beyond its first batch of episodes could pave the way.
To date, IT: Welcome to Derry has never been spoken about in terms of being a singular, one-season limited series, HBO even noted that the “season finale” premieres on Sunday, December 14. This could mean that, if successful, IT: Welcome to Derry will return for more episodes at some point in the future. It’s possible that should this come to pass, it will either continue the story of what was seen in Season 1, meaning the 1960s storyline, but it could also very well go new directions.
As readers know, the entity at the heart of IT, aka Pennywise the Dancing Clown, aka Bob Gray, aka the Eater of Worlds, goes into hibernation and awakens to feed on the town of Derry every 27 years. Records of terrible things and mass disappearances go back hundreds of years, killing settlers in the 1700s and being present for the ironworks explosion in 1906. Suffice to say, the text King created offers almost unlimited potential for new seasons of IT: Welcome to Derry to explore, with both plenty of time periods to dig into and connections to other King titles.
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