In a sweeping interview with Variety, Stranger Things creators the Duffer brothers discuss everything from their creepy twin magic (“the Duffers have lived inside what [Shawn] Levy affectionately calls a ‘bubble of twinship,’” the interview reveals) to their recently announced deal with Paramount. Mostly, though, the story focuses on Stranger Things’ upcoming fifth and final season.
While the Duffers are unsurprisingly choosing to keep most of the final season’s secrets to themselves, they do discuss the long road to this point in the show. In fact, they say that their time with Stranger Things went a little longer than they initially intended.
“Part of me regrets not having been able to tell more different stories over the course of 10 years,” Matt Duffer reveals. “Sometimes I wonder about that — because it ate up our entire 30s. I wish we had gotten it done a little faster, but it is what it is.”
Ross Duffer echoes and expands on that sentiment by adding, “But when we started, it was very early Netflix. And I don’t know how many more opportunities there are going to be to tell stories of this length on that size canvas. So whenever I have the regrets that Matt was saying, I’m excited that we were able to take advantage of this very specific period of time in the industry.”
So, why the regrets? Well, some of it is a simple matter of the pair wanting to get into filmmaking. The Duffers have made it clear that their recent deal with Paramount was largely prompted by their desire to make the kind of theatrically released movies that Netflix has largely shied away from. Still, Matt Duffer makes it clear that the pair could have made that decision long ago but stayed with Netflix and Stranger Things simply because they wanted to.
“To go this long was our choice,” Matt says. “We could have jumped ship and done movies, and we elected not to — and I’m glad we didn’t. We finished telling this story, and luckily we weren’t too old when we started it, so we’re OK. I mean, Ridley Scott didn’t start making movies until he was in his 40s.”
That age comment is certainly a bit… odd, but the overall sentiment rings true. Throughout the interview, the Duffers say that they want to make sure that Stranger Things doesn’t botch its ending as other famous shows have, so it makes sense that they wouldn’t abandon the series part of the way through.
Interestingly, the interview also brings up a time when Matt told reporters that the brothers saw Stranger Things as a “four and done” show. However, Matt notes that when they decided to go in a different direction with the show’s third season and tell a slightly more isolated story that didn’t advance the overall mythology as much as they perhaps intended, they ultimately decided to push the series to five seasons. Of course, Stranger Things will also live on via spin-off series that the Duffers will oversee.
So while it doesn’t sound like the Duffer brothers meant to be working on Stranger Things for five seasons, the show’s final season is still scheduled to debut on Netflix on November 26. The second part of that season will be available via the streaming service starting on December 25, and the finale will debut on December 31.
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