Stranger Things fans are worried their favorite characters will be killed off in a season 5 bloodbath — and now creators Matt and Ross Duffer are weighing in.
“I’ve said this before: The show is not Game of Thrones,” Matt, 41, told Variety after part 1 of the final season was released on Wednesday, November 26. “I’m hoping [the finale] surprises people.”
Matt specifically addressed the chances of an onscreen massacre. “There’s no Red Wedding, if that’s what you’re asking,” he said in reference to an iconic episode of Game of Thrones that resulted in a multitude of character deaths. “That would be depressing.”
The hit Netflix series, which debuted in 2016, focuses on a fictional town where a series of supernatural events take place and cause mystery and mayhem. Over the course of five seasons, Stranger Things has catapulted its cast members — Finn Wolfhard, Noah Schnapp, Millie Bobby Brown, Gaten Matarazzo, Caleb McLaughlin, Natalia Dyer, Charlie Heaton and Joe Keery — to stardom. The show also features Winona Ryder and David Harbour.
Ahead of the show’s season 4 premiere in 2022, Matt and Ross, 41, announced that they were going to end the series after one more chapter in Hawkins, Indiana.
“Seven years ago, we planned out the complete story arc for Stranger Things,” they detailed in an open letter in February 2022. “At the time, we predicted the story would last four to five seasons. It proved too large to tell in four but — as you’ll see for yourselves — we are now hurtling toward our finale. Season 4 will be the penultimate season; season 5 will be the last.”
Later that year, the Duffer Brothers opened up about their vision for the final episodes and why the episodes were now released in multiple parts.
“The original plan was to release it all at once again. But as we began turning over episodes, everyone began to feel the season was too big to be released in one batch — at nearly 13 hours, it is really more two seasons than one,” they told Variety in May 2022 after Volume 1 dropped the first seven episodes. “Episode 7 is as big as any season finale we’ve ever had, so it made sense to everyone involved to split the season there. Episode 7 really serves as the end of the second act — and we feel that our final act had enough meat on the bone to make up Volume 2.”
The first part ended on a shocking note when Will (Schnapp) channeled surprise powers that allowed him to fight against Vecna’s (Jamie Campbell Bower) reign of power.
“Once we decided we knew we wanted to do the Will power stuff this season, we knew that that’s how we had to end Volume 1,” Ross told Variety. “So there’s the low point of all the kids being taken, but the high point of Will has these powers. That was always the discussion.”
He added: “Vecna taking these children was the low point we needed for the end of Volume 1.”
Stranger Things returns with Volume 2 on December 25 and the finale drops December 31 on Netflix.
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