Stranger Things season 4 brings an expanded scope and longer episodes

Unlike previous seasons of the hit Netflix series Stranger Things, the upcoming fourth season is going to be split into two “volumes”. Volume 1 reaches the streaming service on May 27th and Volume 2 will follow on July 1st. Speaking at Deadline‘s Contenders Television panel, Stranger Things creators the Duffer Brothers said season 4 is going to have a wider scope than the preceding seasons, and will also have longer episodes. So it sounds like splitting this one in two actually makes sense.

Matt Duffer said,

We kind of jokingly call it our Game of Thrones season because it’s so spread out, so I think that’s what’s unique or most unique about the season. Joyce and Byers family have left at the end of Season 3. They are in California – we’ve always wanted to have that like ‘E.T’.-esque suburb aesthetic, which we finally got to do this year in the desert; and then we have Hopper in Russia; and then of course we have a group remaining in Hawkins. So we have these three storylines, are all connected and kind of interwoven together, but it’s just very different tones. … I don’t think we have an episode clocking in under an hour – even in Season 1 there were episodes that were like 35 minutes. You kind of forget that. This season, they’re very long, so I think it’s almost double the length of any season. So that’s one reason it’s taken so long. It does have this sort of epic quality to it. It’s a different feel, for sure.”

Ross Duffer added that this season will also deliver some answers about the supernatural threat at the core of the series. He said,

Back when we did Season 1, Netflix just kept going ‘Can you explain all this mythology to us?’ So we wrote this giant 20-page document, which talked about everything in terms of what was going on and what exactly the Upside Down was. And then each season we’re just sort of peeling back the layers of that onion, so to speak. But this season, we really wanted to really get into it and [revealing] some of those answers. But to do that properly, we needed time, so it just became bigger and bigger.”

We’ve previously heard that Stranger Things season 4 will find that David Harbour‘s character Hopper is 

imprisoned far from home in the snowy wasteland of Kamchatka, where he will face dangers both human… and other. 

Meanwhile, back in the states, a new horror is beginning to surface, something long buried, something that connects everything. 

Harbour is joined in the cast by Finn Wolfhard as Mike Wheeler, Millie Bobby Brown as Eleven, Noah Schnapp as Will Byers, Sadie Sink as Max Mayfield, Gaten Matarazzo as Dustin Henderson, Winona Ryder as Joyce Byers, Caleb McLaughlin as Lucas Sinclair, Priah Ferguson as Erica Sinclair, Joe Keery as Steve Harrington, Natalia Dyer as Nancy Wheeler, Maya Hawke as Robin Buckley, Brett Gelman as Murray Bauman, Joseph Quinn as Eddie Munson, Eduardo Franco as Argyle, Charlie Heaton as Jonathan Byers, Cara Buono as Karen Wheeler, and Matthew Modine as Dr. Martin Brenner.

Some of the names mentioned in there are new to the series, and Stranger Things season 4 also includes new additions Robert Englund, Amybeth McNulty, Myles Truitt, Regina Ting Chen, Grace Van Dien, Jamie Campbell Bower, Tom Wlaschiha, Sherman Augustus, Mason Dye, Nikola Djuricko, and Levon Hawke.