The fourth season of Netflix’s smash hit Stranger Things had only been shooting for a matter of weeks before the production was shut down due to the Coronavirus pandemic, and with the cast and crew still waiting on the all-clear to get back to work, there’s been no hint of an official release date. Although, given the extensive post-production and visual effects work required, mid-2021 could be a safe bet.
Despite the streaming service having loaded up on original content over the last few years, Stranger Things is still regarded as Netflix’s marquee show, with the third season setting viewership records after racking up a massive 64 million streams in the first four weeks it was available, and over 40 million of those came in the first four days alone.
It would be an understatement to say that anticipation is already through the roof for the fourth run, then, and we still don’t have a clue in what direction the plot is heading besides the reveal of a brief teaser trailer. Having signed an exclusive deal to develop and produce content for Netflix, there were rumors that creators the Duffer brothers were considering wrapping the show up with season 4, but in a recent interview, they confirmed that the next batch of episodes won’t be the last, as well as explaining how it’ll look and feel different to the previous three.
“Season 4 won’t be the end. We know what the end is, and we know when it is. The delay has given us time to look ahead, figure out what is best for the show. Starting to fill that out gave us a better idea of how long we need to tell that story. We want each season to feel different, as opposed to re-creating the same thing over and over again. With season three, we realized early on that we were going to shoot mostly in the summer and that it would be released in the summer.
Automatically, that gave it this very different feel in terms of both the tone and the colors. We wanted it very saturated, and we wanted this season to feel like the big Hollywood summer blockbusters that we grew up with and loved so much. There’s a little more humor in it, a little more action, and it just has a different feel than the past two seasons, which were set in the fall and a little more dreary and scary.”
We now know that Stranger Things is going to run for at least five seasons (though it’s thought that the fourth one will be split into two parts), but there’s also been rumors of a feature-length movie to bring the story to a definitive close, and while fans will find it hard to say goodbye to the core cast of characters having become so emotionally invested in their journey, there’s been plenty of shows in the past that stuck around for too long and ended up all the worse for it.