Stranger Things Season 2: Release Date Confirmed, New Poster Out
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 we currently know about Stranger Things Season 2, and we’ll keep this article updated as we find out more.
Stranger Things Season 2 Release Date Confirmed + Poster
Stranger Things season 2 will arrive on October 27, 2017, as confirmed by this incredible new poster.
And you know what’s even cooler than that? We know that this season jumps ahead one year, but keeps the chilly autumn vibes. Get ready for Halloween 1984, where a certain summer movie release from a few months before had a clear effect on our young heroes.
Anyone want to take bets that they’re the only ones who dressed up for Halloween at school? We’ve been there. Stranger Things co-creator Matt Duffer told Entertainment Weekly that in season 2, Will Byers “seems to be seeing images from the Upside Down—the question is whether they’re real or not,” which explains that weird vision he was having in the trailer (which you can watch below).
Stranger Things Season 2 Trailer
Finally! Here’s the first Stranger Things Season 2 trailer!
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:
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 season two:
We wrote about this in more detail here if you’re interested.
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!
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
The Duffers made an experimental move, revealing the titles for the 9-episode sophomore season; a prescient gift they might end up having to rescind. They admit that the move to unveil the Season 2 episode titles was a risky gambit designed to make the most of what little they had on the table at the time. However, since the move might have revealed too much about the state of the Season 2 scripts, they also hint that those titles might have to change. According to the Duffers:
Ross: That was all our idea, so if it blows up in our faces …
Matt: Netflix had another teaser, but it was about going back to stuff that had happened already. I thought it wasn’t exciting enough, and we wanted to provide some hint of where we were going in season two without giving anything away. I do think some of the titles will change. There were titles we didn’t want to put on there because we felt like it would give too much away. The whole season was already broken when we did this.
Ross: So, we did have a lot that we could tease.
Interestingly, when it comes to said Season 2 episodes, the Duffers also acknowledge the rather unconventional quantity of nine. Typically, when a risky television project becomes a proven success, the episode numbers are bumped up to fit a paradigm, which for the average Netflix show is somewhere around thirteen. However, Stranger Things is a unique phenomenon whose thematic resemblance to 1980’s adventure and horror films also inspired its more cinematic structure; something that the Duffers – who grew up more drawn to film than serial television – feel would be watered down by going too far beyond the initial eight-episode structure, compromising with nine.
Matt: It’s a weird number, right?
Ross: Netflix didn’t pressure us to do more or anything. We don’t feel like we need a full 10 episodes. But it can’t quite fit in eight, so that’s how we ended up in nine. And I think in future seasons it will be the same thing. Let’s break out the story and see what we need. Whatever number it ends up at, great. The thing I like about keeping it down to eight or nine is that we’re able to more meticulously control things and try to keep it from turning into this machine that’s grinding things out. If it gets much longer, it could become unwieldy and just turn into a traditional show — which is what we’re avoiding.
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.
Executive producer Shawn Levy spoke with Southern California Public Radio, and promises they will rise to the occasion. “It’s scary to have people love something this much,” he said (transcribed quotes via Collider). “It becomes impossible to banish all thoughts of not wanting to disappoint. This has been the challenge of it: on the one hand as we’ve see in the movie world, to do a follow-up that feels like the same thing is disappointing to an audience; to abandon things or change things [from the original], that disappoints the audience.”
“Season 2 is bigger and potentially darker in its stakes,” director and executive producer Shawn Levy recently 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.”
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.
