Stranger Things 2 Release Date, Trailer, Cast, and More News
Netflix’s Stranger Things has abruptly emerged from the proverbial Upside Down to take its place as a pop culture phenomenon. It also happens to be one of the streaming outlet’s biggest hits ever with a reported 8.2 million people watching Season 1 in its first 16 days, a feat that apparently surpasses Netflix’s popular Marvel shows like Daredevil, Jessica Jones, and even its headline-generating Making a Murderer documentary series.
Here’s everything you could possibly want to know about Stranger Things season 2…
Stranger Things Season 2 Trailer
The final Stranger Things Season 2 trailer is here!
And if that’s not enough for you greedy spoiler hounds, check out these clips, too!
There’s some earlier footage for you, too…
How’s this for a cryptic Stranger Things season 2 trailer? Is Eleven using some sort of memory strategy to escape the Upside Down? We can make out words like “sunflower,” “rainbow,” and “450,” along with directions such as “four to the left” and “three to the right.” What could it mean?
The Stranger Things season 2 trailer that was released at San Diego Comic-Con 2017 was simply amazing!
For a full breakdown of what this trailer shows us about the coming season, read our full trailer breakdown and analysis.
Here’s an earlier trailer…
And while it isn’t a trailer, this properly 1980s-styled news report covering the events of season one might also hold a couple of clues for Stranger Things season 2:
We wrote about this in more detail here if you’re interested.
Stranger Things Season 2 Release Date
Stranger Things season 2 will arrive on October 27, 2017.
Read the full Den of Geek NYCC Special Edition Magazine right here!
Stranger Things Season 2 Cast
In addition to the returning cast (more on that down below), Stranger Things Season 2 has added some high profile new members. The news and character descriptions come courtesy of The Hollywood Reporter.
Sean Astin (The Goonies) will play Bob Newby “a kind-hearted former nerd who went to high school with Joyce (Winona Ryder) and Hopper (David Harbour) and now manages the local Hawkins RadioShack.” Just the fact that there’s a RadioShack that is probably useful and profitable is a wonderful piece of 1984-appropriate detail. However, there’s apparently more to Bob and Joyce’s relationship than school days nostalgia. At the Fan2Sea Comic Con cruise, David Harbour revealed that Astin’s Bob is Joyce’s boyfriend; something that’s not exactly thrilling Harbour’s police chief Jim Hopper, who seemed to have some chemistry with Joyce in Season 1.
Paul Reiser will play Dr. Owens, “a high-ranking member within the Department of Energy on a ‘clean-up’ assignment who is tasked with containing the events of last year.” Now, casting Paul Reiser in a role in an ’80s throwback is immediately going to bring comparisons to his role in Aliens, and according to Entertainment Weekly, that was the plan all along. “We want people to have those debates like, ‘Do you trust that guy or is he Burke?’” Ross Duffer said. “Paul was saying the reason James Cameron cast him is because he thought people would inherently trust him and it would be a twist.”
Reiser himself is keeping quiet on whether or not he’s a hero or villain in this. “To be honest, I’ve only read a few of the scripts so I still don’t know and I’m not sure they know,” he told EW. “I think part of what they were tickled by was, to whatever extent people know me from Aliens, they’re automatically going, ‘Oh this guy is no good.’ I don’t know where they’re going with it but it’s a fun thing to play.”
Linnea Berthelsen is Roman, “an emotionally damaged, magnetic young woman who suffered a great loss as a child. Although she does not live in Hawkins, she is mysteriously connected to the supernatural events at the lab.” Is that “great loss” linked to The Upside Down? Who knows. Probably!
Shortly after severing ties with Adult Swim in a very public and acrimonious way—accusing the network of alleged misogyny and supporting shows that appeal to alt-right, white nationalism—Variety reports that Brian Gelman will be making the jump to Netflix by joining Stranger Things season 2.
Gelman, who most recently appeared in Fleabag and Brett Gelman’s Dinner in America, will being playing Murray Bauman in Stranger Things, a disgraced journalist turned conspiracy theorist who finds himself investigating a cold case in the show’s central Indiana town. One has to wonder if the cold case could in fact involve Barb? It’d be nice to see if someone finally cared to discover what happened to her.
Sadie Sink will play Max, “a tough and confident girl whose appearance, behavior and pursuits seem more typical of boys than of girls in this era. She has a complicated history and is generally suspicious of those around her.”
Interestingly enough, with the recent Season 2 teaser trailer rolling out a list of the episode names, the title “Madmax” seemingly makes more sense in light of this revelation. Compounding her contemporaneous rebellion against gender norms, Max will also apparently get around town on a skateboard.
Dacre Montgomery will play Billy, “Max’s hyper-confident and edgy older step-brother. He steals girlfriends away from their boyfriends, is great at drinking games and drives a black Camaro. But lurking under his apparent charisma, is a violent and unpredictable nature.”
Montgomery’s Billy isn’t exactly the nicest guy, according to the Duffer brothers. “Stephen King always has really great human villains,” they said. “The evil in the real world is often as bad or worse than the supernatural evil, so we wanted to introduce a character like that.”
THR also has word that both Joe Kerry and Noah Schnapp have been promoted to series regulars for Stranger Things season 2, so expect a lot more of Steve Harrington and Will Byers this time around!
And lastly, although it comes as little surprise, TV Line did confirm that Millie Bobby Brown will return as Eleven for Stranger Things Season 2. Perhaps they saw all those Eleven cosplayers at New York Comic Con (there were so many!) or Eleven Halloween costumes (my local supermarket was stripped clean of Eggos) and realized that there would be riots if this didn’t happen.
Stranger Things Season 2 Episodes
The good news is that Stranger Things Season 2 will be a little longer, with a whopping nine episodes this time around. What, not eleven? C’mon!
When Netflix revealed that Stranger Things season 2 was a go they did it with this cool little teaser that revealed the episode titles as well:
Stranger Things Season 2 Episode 1: Madmax
Stranger Things Season 2 Episode 2: The Boy Who Came Back to Life
Stranger Things Season 2 Episode 3: The Pumpkin Patch
Stranger Things Season 2 Episode 4: The Palace
Stranger Things Season 2 Episode 5: The Storm
Stranger Things Season 2 Episode 6: The Pollywog
Stranger Things Season 2 Episode 7: The Secret Cabin
Stranger Things Season 2 Episode 8: The Brain
Stranger Things Season 2 Episode 9: The Lost Brother
Stranger Things Season 2 Story
Stranger Things creators and showrunners the Duffer Brothers told Entertainment Weekly that if Spielberg, Cronenberg, and Carpenter were the most notable influences on season one, expect to feel some James Cameron in season two. I think one of the reasons his [James Cameron’s] sequels are as successful as they are is he makes them feel very different without losing what we loved about the original,” Matt Duffer said. “So I think we kinda looked to him and what he does and tried to capture a little bit of the magic of his work.”
They also expect to reveal more about the mysteries of the Upside Down. We obviously have this gate to another dimension, which is still very much open in the town of Hawkins,” Matt Dawkins said. “And a lot of questions there in terms of, if the Monster is dead, was it a singular monster? What else could be out there?”
They also promise a similarly disciplined approach as Season 1, while delving deeper into the mythology of the 1980’s-set series that will reportedly even take a field trip outside its small Indiana town of Hawkins. Of course, an obligatory return trip to the Upside Down is also in the cards, with more bizarre creatures possibly lurking.
“Season 2 is bigger and potentially darker in its stakes,” director and executive producer Shawn Levy told Vanity Fair. “The threat, which in Season 1 was to Will Byers, has grown. That’s all I’m going to say! But, I will say Season 2 has a bigger cast and is definitely loyal to the kind of magical storytelling that we established in the first season. It’s character-based and still about our core group of characters.”
You can expect more screen time from one of that core group, too. Noah Schnapp’s Will Byers was (naturally) absent from much of the first season, but that won’t be the case this time. ““In the last episode, I threw up a slug, so Season 2 begins with what happens from there. There may have been some effect on him. I may or may not have turned into a monster. You’ll have to watch to find out.”
A preview of sorts for a Stranger Things Season 2 scene has arrived in the form of a few script pages, provided by EW. While the scene in question may seem innocuous, it’s revelatory for a few reasons, notably the introduction of a new character and the set-up for what’s looking to be a crucial motif for the season.
The scene depicts the boys at their favorite local hangout, the arcade, which carries the WarGames-referencing name “The Palace.” Indeed, creators the Duffer Brothers hint that Season 2 will shift the boys’ focus away from board games and more toward video games, which makes sense for the 1984 setting. Thusly, we see Dustin (Gaten Matarazzo) shocked that his high score on the Dig Dug machine has been toppled by a mysterious player, named “Mad Max,” who – as preview info revealed months ago – will turn out to be the tomboyish new main cast player, Max (Sadie Sink).
The boys are primarily interacting with a new character named Keith, an employee of The Palace, who will be played by Matty Cardarople, an actor you may have already seen on Netflix-exclusive content in A Series of Unfortunate Events, a run on cancelled Karen Gillan ABC sitcom Selfie, as well as films such as Logan Lucky, Jurassic World (pictured above,) and Dumb and Dumber To. While Keith is quite a bit older than the boys (Cardarople is 34 years old), like a geekier, 1980s-era, Wooderson from Dazed and Confused, that’s not stopping him from awkwardly intruding on the boys’ social circles. In fact, he’s even holding the Dig Dug score-topper’s identity as leverage to get Mike (Finn Wolfhard) to hook him up with his sister Nancy (Natalia Dryer).
However, an also-present Will (Noah Schnapp) starts to drift away from the Dig Dug drama, staring out the window, looking at what appears to be another flash to his time in the Upside Down world, seeing everything draped in snow, despite the fact that it’s only October. Thus, the persistent threat hinted at the end of Season 1, which saw Will still coughing up slugs, is ever-present.
Stranger Things was a topic of discussion on the August edition of Sci Fi Fidelity on the Den of Geek Podcast Network. Listen on Soundcloud or simply play the episode below.
