First footage from the new season debuted back in August and included a long-haired Eleven (Millie Bobbie Brown), Hopper (David Harbour) with a flamethrower, and a classic shot of a group of kids racing down a dark street on bicycles. “I mean, it’s bigger, that’s the first thing,” Harbour said of “Stranger Things 4” in a Collider interview earlier this year. “In scope, in scale, even in the idea that we’re not in Hawkins anymore. We, locale-wise, we’re bigger. We’re introducing new stuff, but we’re also tightening and wrapping up in a certain direction to make it have a clear, clean, specific, and definite ending at some point, which I can’t really talk about.”
[Editor’s Note: The following contains spoilers for “Stranger Things” Season 3.] Audiences certainly already knew we’d be moving out of Hawkins considering Hopper is spending time in a Russian prison, after allegedly dying at the end of Season 3. It’s a move the “Black Widow” actor likened to Gandalf’s in “The Lord of the Rings” series. “I’ve had those discussions with [the Duffer brothers] from the very first season,” Harbour said in a previous interview. “We were always interested in that idea of the Gandalf resurrection — Gandalf the Grey who fights the Balrog and then becomes Gandalf the White. It’s the idea of the resurrection of the character. And mythologically, Hopper, in a sense, had to change. I mean, you couldn’t go on the way he was going on. He has to resurrect in some way.” The actor has hinted that the popular series could be nearing its end, perhaps even in Season 4, but the show’s creators, Matt and Ross Duffer, said otherwise. As Ross explained to The Hollywood Reporter, “Season 4 won’t be the end. We know what the end is, and we know when it is. [The pandemic] has given us time to look ahead, figure out what is best for the show. Starting to fill that out gave us a better idea of how long we need to tell that story.” “Stranger Things” Season 4 is expected in 2022. Watch the new trailer below.
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