Matt and Ross Duffer have been dying to destroy Hawkins for a decade. Their show Stranger Things became a phenomenon when it debuted in 2016 and has achieved unrivaled popularity in a fractured TV landscape. But the identical twin showrunners knew it would stretch credulity if the citizens of their ’80s-era Spielbergian hamlet continued to live in a town overrun by extradimensional threats. So for years, they kept the series’ supernatural showdowns to abandoned malls and far-flung Soviet prisons. But now, in the fifth and final season of Netflix’s biggest show, the brothers can finally unleash hell on Main Street.
I step onto the Atlanta set in July 2024, ready to watch the mayhem unfold. It’s day 135, about halfway through filming, and somewhere between 400 and 500 cast and crew members are working today. Nearly 100 camo-clad extras mill outside the library and enjoy craft services’ finest shawarma beside fake bloodied corpses. Stuntmen wait to be thrown into the air by people in gray bodysuits with orange ping-pong balls attached to their heads, who will be transformed into monsters called Demogorgons by the magic of CGI. And it’s not even the biggest scene they’re shooting this year. “The sets were no less ambitious than the ones I used with Marvel,” executive producer and frequent director Shawn Levy tells me later. Levy helmed his last two episodes of Stranger Things between wrapping Deadpool & Wolverine and starting a Star Wars film. “It happens to be a television series, but it’s epic storytelling by any metric.”
On the day of my visit, the Duffer brothers are directing a series of sequences that, when stitched together, will look like a single shot. From inside a dilapidated faux Radio Shack, they call, “Action!” Mike, played by now 22-year-old actor Finn Wolfhard, herds a group of children, one dressed in an “E.T. Phone Home” shirt, away from danger. “By the end of this scene,” visual effects supervisor Michael Maher tells me, “just about everyone you see standing up is going to be dead except the kids.” Ninety minutes and three takes later, Wolfhard wanders over to the Duffers’ monitors and declares the shot looks “sick.” Ross agrees.
When the brothers conceived of Stranger Things in 2013 as a series inspired by childhood favorites like Stand by Me and E.T., they had no idea it would become one of the most profitable shows ever. Data firm Parrot Analytics estimates the series has brought in 2 million new subscribers and over $1 billion in revenue for Netflix since 2020, the year it started tracking data. And each new installment has grown in cost and ambition. “It’s a little scary,” says Matt. “It puts pressure on every season because it has to perform better than the one prior to it in order to continue to justify growing the scale of the show.”
Ross jumps in: “We were nervous about Season 4.” It reportedly cost $30 million per episode, $270 million total, among the most expensive seasons of television ever made. Three years later, Season 4 still sits atop Netflix’s most-watched list based on the number of hours viewed, at 1.8 billion. “It was such a relief when it got the viewership it did because you don’t want to scale down for your final season.”
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