Netflix announces we can return to the Upside Down for Stranger Things season 4 in 2022
The fourth season will premiere nearly 3 years after the third season aired on the streamer
After 2 years of things being strange and scary for many reasons (both real and fictional), Stranger Things finally gave us a more concrete timeframe for its season 4 premiere on Netflix. We won’t have any new episodes of the science fiction thriller series this year—the streamer confirmed that the premiere is expected sometime in 2022.
The new 30-second teaser posted this morning features a mix of old and new footage but it doesn’t reveal too much—we do get a short clip of Eleven and the gang running in terror, which probably means that whatever they’re taking on this season is bigger and scarier than ever before. As with nearly every other large production, the pandemic stalled season 4 filming for a good while. It resumed last September, with the last few months taking producer Shawn Levy all over the world.
“I shot in Lithuania right before the pandemic. We have filmed in Georgia, Lithuania and New Mexico, so suffice to say Season 4 is sprawling,” told Variety in July. “It’s visually and narratively very ambitious, much more ambitious than the prior three seasons.”
It’s been a long 2 years since season 3 hit the streamer on July 4, 2019, so here’s a brief catch up. After taking out the Russians’ lab beneath the Starcourt Mall, Joyce decided that it was time for a new beginning for her family and she took Will, Eleven, and Jonathan far from their hometown of Hawkins, Indiana. Hopper, presumed dead in the explosion that took out the lab in the season’s finale, was revealed to be alive under Soviet imprisonment in Kamchatka. May’s teaser hints that viewers will learn more about the still mysterious origins of Eleven, taking us inside the lab she grew up in.
“Although it’s not all good news for our ‘American’ (Hopper); he is imprisoned far from home in the snowy wasteland of Kamchatka, where he will face dangers both human… and other,” series creators the Duffer brothers said last year. “Meanwhile, back in the States, a new horror is beginning to surface, something long buried, something that connects everything. Season 4 is shaping up to be the biggest and most frightening season yet, and we cannot wait for everyone to see more.”
Series staples David Harbour, Winona Ryder, Natalia Dyer, Finn Wolfhard, Joe Keery, Sadie Sink, Mille Bobbie Brown, Gaten Matarazzo, Caleb McLaughlin, Noah Schnapp, and Charlie Heaton are all returning for the fourth season. New cast additions include: series regulars Jamie Campbell Bower, Eduardo Franco, Joseph Quinn, Robert Englund, as well as Amybeth McNulty, Myles Truitt, Regina Ting Chen, and Grace Van Dien.