Happy Saturday, my fellow strangers! It’s Mrs. Strange once more. On today’s episode
for Stranger Universe, I will talk about why Stranger Things 4 is taking so long to film
and why it won’t be releasing until 2022.
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Yesterday, the world was treated with a new exciting sneak peek to Stranger Things season
4, which revealed that it will unfortunately come out in 2022. Since July 2019, viewers
have waited eagerly for news about the new season and a release date. The production
team has always emphasized quality over speed, meaning there have been hefty gaps between
previous seasons, but this time round things have taken even longer. And now, Netflix has
finally released a new season 4 teaser confirming a 2022 release, although no specific date
has been given just yet. This will come as a hard blow to fans, but executive producer
and director Shawn Levy wants them to know the wait is also paining the filmmakers who
are putting the new season together.
So why is Stranger Things 4 taking so long? It’s a combination of factors, not the least
of which being that the pandemic hit right as filming was hitting its stride in early
2020. Production was shut down for a number of months, and when it picked back up again
new safety protocols made the filming process even slower. But as Levy explained to Collider’s
Steve Weintraub during an interview tied to the press day of his new film Free Guy, the
Stranger Things season 4 delay is also due to the fact that as conceived by showrunners
Matt and Ross Duffer, this is the show’s biggest season yet – by far:
“As much as it pains our viewers that it will have been so long, trust me, it pains
Matt, Ross, and I more. It is a kind of perfect storm combination of COVID shutdown, slower
pace of filming in COVID protocols and health protocols, which are necessary, and coincidentally
we chose Season 4 to be by far — and I mean, by far, far, far — the most ambitious of
the seasons.” Levy added that in contrast to the first three seasons when production
was primarily based in Georgia, Season 4 goes outside of Hawkins in a big way: “It's already
known that, as the pandemic was starting, I was over in Lithuania with David Harbour
shooting that piece that revealed Hopper's alive. So you kind of know we've got some
action in Hawkins, we’ve got some action apparently in Russia, and we have an entire
storyline set elsewhere that will soon come to light. So this is the first season where
we have this sprawling geography, multiple location shoots, and we're doing it all against
a backdrop of a world that has made filming slower longer in delay. So that's why it's
taking so long.”
That “entire storyline set elsewhere” is a clear reference to a small town in California
called Lenora Hills, based on recent set leaks. We shall see how much space that storyline
will take up this season, but this all makes sense! Everything from 2020 was delayed, and
that extends to Stranger Things. Moreover, Levy explained that in contrast to some other
shows, Stranger Things has a relatively small creative team: "The reason Stranger Things
take so long is everything is handmade by a very small group of us. The brothers, they
want to direct a certain number of episodes every year, I have to direct my episodes every
year. We have to be in the edit room and lay hands on all of it ourselves. If you look
at the show, there's no like 12 executive producers. It's still a very small group and
the controls are rigorous on each episode and on anything that the franchise does, whether
it's the drive-through experience in LA or a Nike sneaker that was put out in the summer
of 2019, we see and to approve it all." And it's that control that keeps the quality of
the series high. While fans are eager to finally see the new episodes, it certainly sounds
like it’ll be worth the wait.
Production may be underway again, but unfortunately the pandemic is still having an effect - simply
because of additional health and safety requirements. "It's definitely a slower process than usual,