Netflix’s ‘Stranger Things’ Spin-Off Will Be ‘1,000% Different’

While we know that Stranger Things season 5 is coming to end the series, probably a year and a half from now, there is also another project in the works, one that Netflix has not officially announced, but the Duffer Brothers seem content talking about it all the time in multiple interviews.

From the Happy Sad Confused podcast (via The Wrap), the Duffer Brothers spoke about their goals for the upcoming spin-off, which is something they are not actually going to be showrunning/writing/directing themselves, it seems, as they pass the reins to someone new:

“Hopefully we find that right person to pass the baton to while we go on to do new stuff,” the Duffer Brothers said. They are “really jazzed” about the idea and say it is “1000% different” from Stranger Things.

Do you want your spin-off to be “1,000% different” from the hit show that spawned it? They go into a little more detail about what exactly they mean by that:

“I’ve read these rumors that there’s gonna be an Eleven spinoff, that there’s gonna be a Steve and Dustin spinoff, or that it’s another number. That’s not interesting to me because we’ve done all that. We’ve spent I don’t know how many hours exploring all of that. So it’s very different.”

“The most important connective tissue I would say is the storytelling sensibility of it,” they continued. “There is story that connects to the ‘Stranger Things’ world, but it really is more about how we’re telling that story.”

This essentially ends speculation that the Stranger Things spin-off may follow the seemingly lost character of Kali, or Eight, a powered character introduced in a standalone season 2 episode that very much felt like a test pilot for a possible new series. But that is not happening, it seems.

The Duffers seem to want to emphasize is the main thing is that the tone is going to be the same, and they talk about how they wanted to recapture the sense of wonder in older ‘80s movies, and that no one had really done that except Super 8. It’s interesting, because while certainly season 1 is a retread of ET in many ways, by season 4 now, we are getting to Nightmare on Elm Street territory, bordering on Hereditary in some instances, so I’m not sure Stranger Things itself has the same tone all the way through.

But what seems clear is that they are not just going to pick a character in the series and given them their own thing, which is what everyone was probably expecting. This could end up being something akin to the way Fear the Walking Dead spun of out of The Walking Dead, where it was the same universe, the same threat (the Upside Down/zombies) but new characters, a new part of the country. Though of course Fear did have character crossovers eventually, and I’d be surprised if zero cast members ever appeared in any Stranger Things spin-off.

We’ll see what the future holds, but I’m guessing it’s…something we probably cannot actually guess, knowing the Duffers.

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