As with most every project out there, production on the fourth season of Stranger Things was shut down earlier this year thanks to the spread of COVID-19. Filming on the season wouldn't resume until late September, but there is one silver lining – the additional time has let series creators Matt and Ross Duffer craft what will hopefully be the best season yet.
The luxury of time isn't something to be found in most productions, but Stranger Things executive producer Shawn Levy recently told Collider that the pandemic delay has allowed the Duffer brothers to finish writing the entire season before they shot it, which is a first for the Netflix series.
I’ll just say the pandemic definitely massively delayed shooting and therefore the launch of our current Season 4, date still TBD. But it impacted very positively by allowing the Duffer brothers, for the first time ever, to write the entire season before we shoot it and to have time to rewrite in a way that they rarely had before so the quality of these screenplays are exceptional, maybe better than ever.
While we still don't know entirely what to expect from the new season, Matt and Ross Duffer have previously teased that it will feel very different to what has come before. "We don’t want to write ourselves in a corner so we try to have these early discussions with the writers just to make sure that we’re setting ourselves up to go in the right direction," the Duffer brothers said. "We don’t know a lot, but we do know a lot of the big broad strokes. At the end of season two, we knew about Billy. We knew that the Russians were going to come in. We didn’t know the mall and stuff, but again, we know these big broad strokes. That’s sort of where we are in season four. We have the big broad strokes. It’s just now about filling in those lines in the details. We’re pretty excited about where it’s potentially going to go. Again, like we said, it’s going to feel very different than this season. But I think that’s the right thing to do and I think it’ll be exciting." Can't wait. The release date of the fourth season of Stranger Things is still up in the air, but I would imagine that it should drop sometime next year.