Netflix is still playing coy with the release date for Season 4 of Stranger Things but the streamer has blessed us with a new teaser trailer that welcomes us to the Rainbow Room, where we meet the 10 other gifted children who grew up, so to speak, with Eleven (Millie Bobby Brown).
It has been nearly two years since Season 3 debuted on Netflix, and given the fact that the Duffer Brothers are still shooting Season 4, we may have to continue being patient, though it's clear the extended wait will be coming to an end relatively soon. The delay was, of course, due to the pandemic, though it seemed to give the show's creative team more time to come up with something special for what is widely expected to be the penultimate season of Stranger Things.
The coming-of-age sci-fi series sees Matt Duffer and Ross Duffer return as executive producers and showrunners for Season 4, which brings back Brown and her co-stars Finn Wolfhard, Gaten Matarazzo, Caleb McLaughlin, Noah Schnapp, Sadie Sink, Natalia Dyer, Charlie Heaton, Joe Keery, Priah Ferguson, Maya Hawke and Winona Ryder.
David Harbour will also reprise his beloved role as Hopper, who was last presumed dead at the end of Season 3, but whose survival was teased in a post-credits scene and then confirmed by the start-of-production teaser trailer that was released last February.
Plot details for Season 4 of Stranger Things remain closely guarded by Netflix, but newcomers to the cast include Jamie Campbell Bower and genre icon Robert Englund, and the Duffer brothers previously teased that the show will be moving outside of Hawkins, Indiana for a significant period of time.
While the long wait has been excruciating for fans, Matarazzo previously told Collider that the delay allowed the Duffer Brothers to do something they'd never been able to do on prior seasons: finish all the scripts before filming started. Indeed, the Duffers and the show's writers used the pandemic to complete all the Season 4 scripts, so that when production resumed they were able to focus only on the making of the show.
“I think they’ve been able to relish in directing in their day-to-day. There’s nothing else distracting them other than what we’re gonna do today while we’re directing, and I asked them, ‘Do you guys sleep at night?’ they’re like, ‘Literally we dream about directing this show. We go to sleep and we have dreams that we’re just directing this show,’ it takes up their entire minds when they’re making this. So I think it’s a good thing because now they can take their focus off of what the show is going to be about, and now that they know it, they can focus on how they’re going to deliver. And I think it shows.”
Stranger Things is one of Netflix's most popular titles, as 40.7 million households watched Season 3 within its first four days on the service --more than any other Netflix film or series in that timeframe -- with 64 million households watching over its first four weeks. Check out the latest Season 4 teaser trailer below, and keep an ear out for Matthew Modine's Dr. Brenner, whose creepy voice is unmistakable.