TV Ratings: ‘IT: Welcome to Derry’ Scares Up Big Premiere Audience

The premiere of IT: Welcome to Derry enticed a lot of viewers back into Pennywise’s clutches.

The HBO series debuted to 5.7 million cross-platform viewers (measured over three days), making Welcome to Derry the third biggest series debut in HBO’s history. It trails only the premieres of House of the Dragon — which had nearly 10 million day-one viewers in 2022 — and The Last of Us, which opened with 4.7 million on its first night in 2023 and moved well past 5.7 million in following the three days.

IT: Welcome to Derry is a prequel to the It movies, which are based on Stephen King’s novel. The show is set in Derry, Maine, in the early 1960s — during one of the “cycles” in which the shape-shifting killer clown Pennywise resurfaces to wreak havoc.

The premiere ends with a shocking bit of violence that upends the way the two movies unfolded — purposely, IT filmmakers Andy and Barbara Muschietti told The Hollywood Reporter (spoilers contained in that link). “We did two movies already. One thing that we didn’t want was to — given that we’re using the same tone and the style as the movies — get people too familiar [with the story mechanics]. We really wanted to create a subversion to get people excited. It has to do also with raising the volume a little in terms of intensity and spectacle.”

As is almost always the case with HBO shows in recent years, the vast majority of Welcome to Derry’s 5.7 million viewers watched the show after its on-air premiere. Nielsen figures have the first airing of the show on HBO at just 334,000 viewers (which is itself up from the 214,000 for Task’s debut in September), meaning that about 94 percent of the total audience came from streaming on HBO Max and on-air replays at HBO.