With season four now in our rearview mirror, the end is in sight for Stranger Things. But while there’s only one more batch of episodes to go of the mainline series, there’s no way this phenomenally successfully franchise is going to go the way of Barb and Bob, so it’s no surprise that creators the Duffer brothers are already working on a spinoff that will extend what we might end up calling the Stranger-verse.
The only problem is that we have no clue what this spinoff is about yet. Still, at least we’re not the only ones as it turns out neither does Netflix. Matt and Ross Duffer spoke to host Josh Horowitz on his Happy Sad Confused podcast and had a few words to say about the super-secretive spinoff. Although the pair of them are busy developing it, it seems like no one else is in the know right now — no one, that is, except Finn Wolfhard. As Matt revealed:
“We’re working on, today, a spinoff idea that we haven’t told anyone about… Finn knows. I think it drives Netflix crazy that we talk about it in the press but they don’t know what it is yet.”
Ross Duffer confirmed that Ted Sarandos and the Netflix crew are as in the dark as the rest of us, with the brothers refusing to tell the streaming bosses any details at this stage. “They were just asking us about it,” Ross said, but apparently they didn’t get any answers.
Netflix isn’t afraid to go begging the Mike Wheeler star for info either. “They’re trying to get it out of Finn,” Matt rejoindered. As for how Wolfhard came to be in such a coveted position, he’s only aware of the spinoff’s premise because he happened to independently come up with the idea himself. Matt explained:
“It’s not like he machine-gunned ideas at us. He was just like, ‘is it this?’ And it’s so off-the-wall, it’s not what anyone would think, so I don’t know how Finn picked it out.”
The fact that Wolfhard worked it out gives us hope that it is possible to deduce what the spinoff’s about and it must be a jumping-off point from what’s going on in the show to some extent. Clearly, however, it’s not something as straightforward as “what did the kids do next?” And we’re pretty sure that, whatever it is, the Stranger Things offshoot won’t include Eight and her posse of Chicago-based punks.