It: Welcome to Derry co-showrunner Jason Fuchs says one of the most diabolical moments in episode 5 was a scrapped idea from It: Chapter Two.
Warning: Massive spoilers for It: Welcome to Derry episode 5 below!
"It posing as Matty Clements, it hit all those marks for us. It's cruel, it's unexpected, it's incredibly canny in terms of using Matty to get the kids into the tunnels and throw them into Leroy and the team's path," Fuchs tells GamesRadar+. "But I haven't talked to anyone else about this in terms of the genesis of that specific choice. That actually was something I played around with on It: Chapter Two."
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"When I was working on that, I came in and did some production work on and one of the things that I played around with on that was, if you remember that film, Mike Hanlon, as per the book, is still in Derry. He invites our characters back, Ritual of Chüd, they go down into the cistern. All that stuff happens, as it does in the film. Spoiler alert for those who haven't seen Chapter Two. I had a version of that script where they got down into the cistern and they found a starved, bedraggled, hostage Mike Hanlon and realized that the Mike played by Isaiah Mustafa that they'd encountered the entire film was an It manifestation."
This is more or less exactly what happens with Matty in Welcome to Derry episode 5. Lily, Ronnie, Rich, and Will, who are desperate to prove the existence of Pennywise to any person in a position of power who will believe them, are suddenly visited by Matty Clements... who is somehow alive after being killed by It in the first 10 minutes of episode 1. Matty tells his friends that he's been staying alive in the sewers, and that one of their murdered friends, Phil, is actually still alive down there, too. Believing in him wholeheartedly, the group (with the addition of Marge, who finally believes that Ronnie's dad is innocent), follows Matty into the sewers in hopes of finding Phil.
Once they get down there, however, the bodies of their deceased friends float to the top of the water... including that of Matty Clements. The Matty standing in front of them suddenly stretches, warps, and transforms into none other than Pennywise.
It's possible that something similar could've worked in It: Chapter Two, which sees Mike bring the Losers Club back to Derry 27 years later to defeat Pennywise once and for all, but Fuchs (and myself, for that matter) didn't think it would've done any justice to the character of grown-up Mike Hanlon, who becomes a librarian dedicated to researching the sordid history of Derry, Maine. In the It novel, Mike's extensive research can be found in the index. It's this research that served as the basis for Welcome to Derry.
"For a variety of reasons, it didn't feel like the right choice there," Fuchs explains. "I think the main thing the Muschiettis and I felt when we looked at that as an option was that it underserved Mike Hanlon's character, the grown-up Mike Hanlon character. And had we done that, you really only would have been with the real Mike Hanlon for a precious few moments of the third act of that film."
"It felt like an interesting idea that was wrong because it didn't do justice to Mike. And so we abandoned it. And I didn't really think of it again. Until we started building this show. And it was an early idea of, 'What if we use that trick here? What if It was a little stronger here? Is there a way that that might make sense?' And then when it came to how it was going to contrive to have the kids get thrown into jeopardy in the sewers and throw them into the path of the military and have those plot lines converge... that was the moment. I remember being on the phone with [Brad Caleb Kane] and pitching it to him, and we just went, 'Oh yeah, this is exactly it.'"
It: Welcome to Derry is airing now on HBO Max. For more, check out our It: Welcome to Derry release schedule, or, check out our guide to all of the upcoming Stephen King movies and shows you need to know about.
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