Welcome to Derry Review repeats IT Chapter Two’s biggest horror mistake, choosing CGI spectacle over psychological terror that once made Pennywise truly frightening.
When IT: Welcome to Derry aired on HBO at the end of 2024, fans of the genre thought it was going to be a new version of Stephen King’s horrifying world. But in its opening episode, the series offered something else — a very familiar (and not in a good way) experience. The very thing that made IT (2017) a triumph is what turns the prequel’s opening moments into a warning: the misapplication of horror principles that plagued IT: Chapter Two. And if you’re wondering where things went haywire, strap in — because it’s a lesson the franchise should have gotten the first time around.
“Young Matty Clements” The Original Story begins on the night of a snowstorm, a boy called Matty Clements running from his abusive father with nothing else but hope, young Matty Clements. He is taken in by a seemingly warm family, and for a fleeting moment the audience experiences genuine relief for him. Then everything goes horribly wrong. A grotesque, computer generated, winged thing explodes out of the car in a welter of blood. It’s supposed to echo Georgie’s death in the original movie — a chilling first taste of Pennywise’s real form. But here is the problem: it couldn’t be more wrong.
Compare with Georgie’s’s iconic death in IT (2017). Director Andy Muschietti choreographed that scene with surgical precision. Bill Skarsgård’s Pennywise was this chillingly intimate, yet threateningly expansive. The Georgie and clown talk gained genuine dread through conversation and psychology rather than spectacle. Every second seemed well-earned, every shock felt intimate. Pennywise took advantage of Georgie’s particular weakness — his faith in strangers, his wish to get back his boat. That’s efficient terror.”
That’s when it gets frustrating. IT: Chapter Two (2019) in particular was derided for eschewing the psychological horror that made the 1990 version so effective. The sequel padded itself out with a two-hour-and-forty-nine-minute running time, repetitive solo missions for every Loser Club member, and most damningly a dependence on cartoonish CGI monster moments. Critics were not shy about it—the attack on the Paul Bunyan statue, the grotesquerie creature designs, the visual spectacle that is not actually scary. It was like someone told the filmmakers: Bigger means better, and they darted off blindly downhill.
Chapter Two’s Rotten Tomatoes rating fell 23 points from the original. Box office receipts plummeted by more than $230 million. The message from the crowd was plain: we don’t want spectacle, we want atmosphere.
So what Welcome to Derry accomplishes in its first few minutes? It’s the exact same error. That demon baby on the fly, that horrific beast bursting out of the family vehicle, the extended gore set piece — it’s all Chapter Two’s playbook, dusted off and amazon prime-ready. The scene goes on uncomfortably long, giving up slow-building suspense for cheap scares.The winged creature reappears at the end of the episode and that moment works better narratively, though it can still not come close to the real terror of the opening of the original film.
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This isn’t just one badly staged scene. It’s a matter of philosophy.” IT worked because it knew something fundamental: Pennywise is scariest when horror feels close and personal. The warped Judith painting that plagues Stan, the leper that represents Eddie’s hypochondria, Georgie’s guilt-induced visions — these are mental terrors sculpted around each character’s unique fears.
Welcome to Derry had the formula for greatness. It was allowed to roam in the characters, new traumas, and the societal canvas of ’60s Derry, free from the constraints of a single Stephen King novel. It got a chance to fix Chapter Two’s mistakes. Instead, it fell all over itself, hurrying for a big monster moment without cultivating the mood of dread that makes Pennywise really scary.
Welcome to Derry has already made beats of learning this lesson in later episodes. Hallucination sequences customized to characters’ fears, atmosphere-building scenes using lighting and suspense, and sequences that prey on mental fragility have far outperformed those big CGI set pieces.
If the show continues on this path – sacrificing spectacle to pummel us with character-specific horror – maybe it’ll break its cycle for once. Because the big lesson isn’t that bigger is better. It’s that personal psychological terror will always stand the test of time over a computer-generated creature, no matter how cool it looks on screen.
IT: Welcome to Derry doesn’t come up short for lack of concepts, it wavers because it abandons what made IT so terrifying to begin with. The franchise was at its weakest when Pennywise ballooned into giant CGI monstrosities; it was at its best when fear tiptoed in silently, cloaked in guilt, trauma, and anxieties so personal they couldn’t be named. Instead of building suspense, the series starts with spectacle in what briefly amounts to the exact mistake that undermined IT: Chapter Two.
That’s not to say the show is irredeemable. Its succeeding episodes point to a more comprehensive approach to psychological horror derived from building atmosphere, character-based dread and the gradual disintegration of safety. If Welcome to Derry keeps playing to those strengths, it can still do right by Stephen King’s legacy instead of watering it down. Because Pennywise, at the end of the day, does not need wings, or blood sprays, or extra run time in order to be frightening — he just needs to get close enough to whisper.
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Fallout Season 2 Release Date will premiere on December 16, 2025, on Prime Video. Check out the release schedule, new Vegas story changes, cast updates and behind-the-scenes details.
The availability of Fallout Season 2 will not only define the series, but also Amazon MGM Studios’ long-range franchise plan. Following a breakout first season that brought critical acclaim, 17 Emmy nominations and a reported audience of over 100 million viewers, the pressure is enormous on the sophomore season. Season 2 is being framed as more than a follow-up — it’s a “course correction,” doubling down on scale, ambition, and industrial intent.
Initially scheduled for December 17, 2025, the premiere has been moved up to Tuesday, December 16, 2025, 6:00 p.m. PT. While this sounds like a small change, it’s part of a strategic effort to capture the pre-holiday media cycle and ring in the most immediate eyeballs across U.S. time zones. Prime Video, meanwhile, has also shifted from releasing the entire first-season all at once to a weekly release, stretching viewer engagement until early 2026.
The promotional Season 2 campaign is just as brash and audacious. In a non-traditional manner, the new premiere date was announced by Amazon with a large scale activation at the Las Vegas Sphere. The building was turned into a post-apocalyptic snow globe containing Lucy MacLean, Maximus, and The Ghoul, which leads to the reveal of a massive Deathclaw and a Radscorpion swooshes away the old date and replaces it with December 16.
The stunt accomplished a number of things, most notably that it tied the marketing directly to the show’s new New Vegas locale, generated serious social media buzz and confirmed that some of the series’ most iconic creatures are making their way back.
Distribution-wise Fallout Season 2 follows the model of global release day-and-date. The first episode will debut worldwide at the exact same time, 6:00 p.m. meaning international audiences will see the episode on December 17 due to time zone differences. After the season premieres, episodes will be made available weekly on Wednesdays through February 4, 2026, with the season consisting of eight episodes.
In fact, Episode 2 and 3 will be released on Christmas Eve and New Year’s Eve respectively, indicating that Amazon is expecting the series to be big holiday counter-programming.
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Season 2 takes a sharp turn narratively, moving from the ruins of Los Angeles to the Mojave Wasteland and New Vegas, where it confronts the legacy of Fallout: New Vegas. The designers use a “Fog of War” mentality to traverse the game’s many endings yet not negate player choice. No single faction’s triumph clearly marks the present after fifteen years following the events of the game.
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Ella Purnell in Fallout Season 1 | Credit: Prime Video
Rather, the Mojave is a fragmented, chaotic place where every faction imagines it has already won—and is now battling to reassert control. This setting creates an intricate political environment. Robert House, the Old World technological autocrat, is back, this time portrayed by Justin Theroux.
“That scene happened, but there’s a lot more in the pipeline from that moment until the bombs fall.”
—Wagner said
Caesar’s Legion arrives as a violent, tightly ideological force, with Macaulay Culkin cast as a “mad genius” type character. Cold Fusion technology enables the Brotherhood of Steel to be torn apart by civil war, meanwhile the New California Republic is a shadow of its former glory after previous destruction.
The core cast returns with evolved arcs. Lucy MacLean tries to cling to her moral “Golden Rule” in a harsher world. The Ghoul maintains a balancing act of cynicism and buried humanity, Maximus is disillusioned within the Brotherhood.
Hank MacLean’s story line connects the Vault-Tec conspiracy directly to New Vegas, and Norm is still in Vault 31, finding deeper institutional secrets.
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Manufacturing was moved to California to take advantage of tax credits and film in Mojave-like terrain for enhanced visual authenticity. Despite concerns that devastating wildfires could interrupt work, the group persevered and brought forth their most visualized effort—including the much anticipated Deathclaw.
“Showrunner Geneva Robertson-Dworet revealed that a number of crew members were displaced by the fires, but kept going to finish the season.”
Fallout Season 2 is a tightly controlled-event. With its savvy scheduling, brazen marketing, its weekly storytelling, and its planned grand narrative, the series has made clear that it intends to be a long-term cultural and commercial force. As the narrative progresses into New Vegas, it returns to the franchise’s central question: In a world where everyone thinks they have already won, what do survival and rebuilding mean when war never changes?
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Liam Hemsworth took over the role of Geralt in The Witcher season 4, bringing a new interpretation after Henry Cavill. Fans are divided, but the story continues.
The first episode of The Witcher Season 4 came with one of the most controversial recastings in recent TV history, Liam Hemsworth taking on the legendary role of Geralt of Rivia, in place of Henry Cavill. For three seasons, Cavill was the series’ gravel-voiced, brooding centerpiece, turning the White Wolf into a towering physical symbol tied to his own performance. Unsurprisingly, the change was met with a seismic shift among fans, with numerous posting a craziest hate load well before episode one aired.
Now even the season is far more complicated than the verdict. Is the new Geralt doomed to be boring, cringing under the shadow of his ancestor, or is he buckling up for a great new road? It depends on how you define the character itself.
Many reviews and fans alike agree that Hemsworth’s Geralt pales in comparison, not having the same gravitational charm that Cavill had as the character. So far, opinions are divided, some critics blistering, with new rendition dismissed as painfully one-note, less kindly, a bollard in a wig.
While Cavill’s cold exterior seemed to belay a simmering fury beneath the surface that was just waiting to explode, to some, Hemsworth’s take amounts to nothing more than a listless impersonation.
Also the looks don’t make sense to ignore. Critics said that Hemsworth looks too young or too pretty, as if he’s a sad emo boy who got muscles rather than looking like a grizzled, hardened veteran. For fans who fell in love with the growl and tension of the first three seasons, not having that unmistakable superhero shape leaves a hole that all the mumbling and grunting can’t really fill. To them, this new Geralt is just plain boring – a pale imitation of the White Wolf they had.
But on closer inspection any dullness could actually be a conscious change and arguably one that follows the books more closely. Henry Cavill’s Geralt was very much the silent, grunting monster slayer. The Geralt of Season 4, adapted from the novel Baptism of Fire, is a different man.
He’s both physically and emotionally broken after what happened last season, and he’s desperate for revenge. Members of the show’s creative team and Hemsworth himself have suggested this will be a more vulnerable, heart-driven version of the Witcher.
According to Forbes, Hemsworth has discussed his excitement to play a Geralt who is at a crossroads, where he is motivated by love for his found family, Ciri and Yennefer, rather than his old mantra of neutrality. His arc is largely about his emotional evolution, as he reunites with a new traveling party that includes new characters like Regis.
Certain diehard readers even make the case that Hemsworth’s physical appearance and the way he plays a slightly more loquacious, a bit less invincible, wounded warrior version of the character is a more accurate representation of the character found in the novels by Andrzej Sapkowski. For these viewers, this fresh interpretation is a fantastic chance to take the show in the direction of a more loyal, complicated representation.
In the end, the new Geralt is not a spot-on copy nor is he a complete trainwreck. He’s a work-in-progress and the show has become a full ensemble. Yennefer and Ciri play leading roles in major, action-packed story arcs, taking the emphasis away from Geralt’s mountainous shoulders, softening the blow of the actor swap.
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While fan consensus is still largely split at great disappointment and pleasantly surprised, Hemsworth should probably be commended for taking a nearly impossible task and running with it. If he is invisible to some, it is because he is now the quieter, transitional Geralt the story demands — a grounded figure who is his friends and adopted family on the way to their own journeys.
Whether his run ultimately ends up being amazing or boring will be decided by his ability to take a break and let a quieter, more emotional Geralt step back into the spotlight for season five, and the final season.
Welcome to FandomFans — your source for the latest buzz from Hollywood’s creative underworld. Here, we explore the art of filmmaking, knowing about how visionary directors, designers, and actors shape the worlds we escape into. Today we break down the difference between Old & New Geralt ov Rivia. Why Hemsworth receive negative review from the audience on the first episode of The Witcher.
