[This article contains spoilers from the Stranger Things series finale.]
The Duffer Brothers have effectively ruled out eventually revisiting Mike, Eleven and co. in a Stranger Things sequel as a “gross cash grab,” despite a spinoff of the Netflix hit on the horizon.
Matt Duffer told The Hollywood Reporter that “there’s no plan or intention to tell the story because it’s a coming-of-age story. Ultimately, that’s what it’s supposed to be. That’s what the show always was.”
The Emmy-winning show’s conclusion arrived on the streamer on Jan 1, and featured the expansive gang defeating Henry/Vecna (Jamie Campbell Bower).
Eleven (Millie Bobby Brown) sacrificed herself to collapse the Upside Down and eradicate all the horrors that have to do with it.
Eighteen months later, newly minted high school graduates Mike (Finn Wolfhard), Lucas (Caleb McLaughlin), Max (Sadie Sink), Dustin (Gaten Matarazzo) and Will (Noah Schnapp) play one last round of Dungeons & Dragons, during which Mike theorises that Eleven faked her death and is living somewhere remote and beautiful.
“I mean, Mike’s closing the basement door. We’re closing the door on the story,” said Matt Duffer. “He’s closing the door on his childhood and he’s moving onto adulthood.”
Though Duffer acknowledged there could be a follow-up exploring “a midlife crisis” for the group, he decided it “just sounds really uninteresting! [Laughs] Grandpa Hopper? I don’t know how that would read as anything but a gross cash grab to me.”
Then again, there is a Stranger Things Broadway show – whose lore contributes to the fifth and final season – and a spin-off in the works, which Duffer said will centre on “new characters and a new mythology.”
But, he added, “It feels like … we finished saying everything we wanted to say about these characters, this story and the Upside Down.” – New York Daily News/Tribune News Service
