It might seem like Stephen King’s 1986 horror novel IT and the mega-popular superhero anime My Hero Academia have little in common, but the similarities are plenty. Both properties explore young, socially ostracized protagonists seeking to conquer their fears. And both are connected to Jason Fuchs.
The screenwriter best known for Argylle and Ice Age: Continental Drift, serves as co-showrunner of HBO’s IT prequel series Welcome to Derry, which premieres on Oct 26. He’s also the screenwriter behind Netflix and Legendary’s upcoming live-action My Hero Academia film. So it’s no surprise that Fuchs sees the obvious overlap between the two stories.
“When it comes to writing young characters, you just want to write to the emotional truth of it,” Fuchs tells Polygon.
Taking the similarities one step further, Fuchs compares the young cast of Welcome to Derry, which takes place 27 years before the events of series co-creator Andy Muschietti’s two IT films, to My Hero Academia’s protagonist, Deku, who begins his journey as a kid without superpowers in a world where they’re commonplace.
“In Welcome to Derry, we have a group of outsiders who have to come together to defeat a great evil,” he says. “In My Hero Academia, we’re also writing about an outsider when it comes to someone like Deku, who doesn’t quite fit in because he doesn’t have the quirks of his contemporaries and peers. So yeah, I think there’s some commonality, but they’re such different stories that clearly go off into very different places.”
Unfortunately, Fuchs can’t say much more about My Hero Academia, which is still in the early stages of development and does not yet have a release date. But when shooting begins, he may know where to look for a talented young cast that knows how to play social outcasts.
“I’m in the middle of writing it right now, so we’ve not gotten to the casting portion of it,” he says. “But I will say that when we get around to making My Hero Academia, we should be lucky enough to find young actors who are as talented and gifted as this group was, and just lovely humans, too.”
