Stranger Things 4: When is the new season coming to Netflix?
By Bryce Olin
When is the Stranger Things 4 release date on Netflix? It looks like the series could be released any time between the fall of 2020 and the summer/fall of 2021.
By now, many Stranger Things fans around the world are finishing up Stranger Things 3 and wondering the same thing: When is Stranger Things 4 coming to Netflix?
It happens with all the major Netflix shows. Unfortunately, Netflix has not announced anything about Stranger Things 4, and they probably won’t unveil anything about production on the new season for a while.
With that being the case, we have to channel our inner Dumbledore and set out “into the thickets of wildest guesswork” to predict when Stranger Things 4 will be released on the streaming service.
New seasons of Stranger Things are basically six-plus-hour movies. It takes a long time to write, plan and film and edit all those scenes. It takes feature-length movies with CGI and VFX years to be released, so the Stranger Things team is turning around full seasons of the show faster than it takes movie crews. David Harbour pointed this out recently in an interview with Mashable.
Because of that long production process, I think it’ll take about 16 to 28 months until we see Stranger Things 4. That’s pretty much consistent with the gaps between the first and second season and the second and third season plus a few months.
UPDATE: According to Production Weekly, Stranger Things 4 will start production this fall. If that’s true, we are expecting the next season to be released in the fall or winter of 2020. That will follow the production schedule of the second season.
The first season premiered in July 2016, and the second season followed in October 2017. That’s a difference of about 16 months. Then, it was about 20 months between the second season’s release and the third season’s release in July 2019.
Assuming Stranger Things follows a similar pattern, we’re looking at the new season hitting Netflix sometime in 2021, although it could be as early as fall 2020 if they start production soon.
There are some obvious problems worth pointing out. When the season comes out will likely be dictated by the season. For example, Stranger Things 2 was set over Halloween, and it was released on Netflix just before Halloween. Stranger Things 3 was set during the summer, and the new season premiered Fourth of July weekend.
Why is that important? Well, it determines when the new season will be filmed.
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Again, Stranger Things 2 was set in the fall, and filming started in November 2016. Stranger Things 3 is set in the summer, and it started filming in April 2018.
If Stranger Things 4 is going to be set in the fall, production could probably get started this fall, if they have a good idea the direction the season is going and don’t need a longer break. If that happens, we could see the new season in the fall of 2020. That’s probably a little bit quick, but it’s possible.
If the new season is going to be set in the summer again, they’ll probably start filming next spring, which means the earliest we’d see the season is the summer of 2021.
So, to summarize, we’re looking at Stranger Things 4 coming sometime between the fall of 2020 and the summer of 2021. That’s the best we can guess at this point.