Netflix is returning to the Upside Down.
The streaming giant has renewed the Duffer brothers' breakout hit
Stranger Things for a third season. A return date has not yet been determined for the supernatural drama about the happenings brimming beneath the surface of a small American town.
At the time, Netflix had hoped to film seasons three and four back-to-back in a move to work around any potentially awkward adolescent transitions for its young cast. Creators Matt and Ross Duffer and exec producers Shawn Levy and Dan Cohen quickly nixed that idea.
First bursting with immediate impact in July 2016,
Stranger Things most recently released its nine-episode second season in October, arriving days before Halloween. The events of the season lined up with the holiday theme, too, as the second episode, "
Trick or Treat, Freak," focused on the four young kids at the heart of the series celebrating Halloween in full Ghostbusters regalia.
In the context of the show,
Stranger Things 2 took place slightly less than a year after the events of the first season. Will that same formula follow suit for season three? The final image of the most recent episode — the Mind Flayer lording over Hawkins Middle School from the shadow dimension known as the Upside Down — could lead viewers to believe the next season will pick up immediately after the Snow Ball dance. But in conversation with
The Hollywood Reporter, the Duffers confirmed some form of time jump will occur between seasons.
"Even if we wanted to hop into the action faster, we couldn't," Matt Duffer previously told
THR. "Our kids are aging. We can only write and produce the show so fast. They're going to be almost a year older by the time we start shooting season three. It provides certain challenges. You can't start right after season two ended. It forces you to do a time jump. But what I like is that it makes you evolve the show. It forces the show to evolve and change, because the kids are changing. Even if we wanted it to be static and we wanted to continually recycle the same storyline — and we don't — we would be unable to, just because the kids are changing. It's cool, though. The audience is going to be able to watch these kids come of age every year. The closest example is
Harry Potter. Watching those kids and actors grow up in front of the camera was, to me, very powerful. I mean, I wasn't a kid when I experienced that, and I can only imagine if you were a kid and you were their age, it would have been even more powerful. That's what I'm excited about. It's a long way of saying that yeah, we're going to do a time jump."
Unlike the first season, season two ends in such a way that there's very little clear direction about the future of the series — exactly the way the
Stranger Things creators envisioned it.
"Last year, we had a lot of little cliffhangers at the end of the season. We didn't want to do that again," Matt Duffer told
THR. "We didn't want to box ourselves in for season three. We wanted to be able to start season three on a very clean slate."
'Stranger Things' Renewed for Season 3 at Netflix
