Netflix announced an animated Stranger Things spinoff for 2026 just as fans geared up for the fifth and final season of the hit series.
Stranger Things: Tales From ’85 returns to the fictional Indiana town of Hawkins during the winter of 1985, and the events sit between seasons two and three of the live-action series.
Fans will see their favourite characters from the Stranger Things universe – Eleven, Mike, Dustin, Lucas, Will, Max – confront brand-new monsters. “Welcome back to Hawkins in the stark winter of 1985, where the original characters must fight new monsters and unravel a paranormal mystery terrorising their town,” the series plot reads, according to Netflix’s Tudum.
Stranger Things is set in 1980s Hawkins and follows the small Indian town’s residents after a young girl with psychokinetic abilities opens a gateway between the Earth and an alternate dimension known as the Upside Down.
The original cast isn’t returning to voice the characters in the spinoff, though. It will instead see Brooklyn Davey Norstedt voice Eleven, Jolie Hoang-Rappaport as Max, Luca Diaz as Mike, Ej Williams as Lucas, Braxton Quinney as Dustin, Ben Plessala as Will, and Brett Gipson as Hopper.
Eric Robles is joining as executive producer and showrunner while Matt Duffer and Ross Duffer, creators of the original series, will also serve as executive producers.
“When we started talking about ‘Was there anything else we wanna do with Stranger Things?’, this was one of our first ideas,” Ross Duffer said.
Matt Duffer said in the announcement that “the idea was kind of to evoke a feeling of an ’80s cartoon”.
The announcement on Thursday came just one day before the world premiere of the show’s final season at the Grauman’s Chinese Theatre in Los Angeles.
“I’m really really excited for everyone to see how everyone’s storylines tie back to Season one,” series star Millie Bobby Brown said at the premiere.
“I'm very, very lucky that I'm able to meet these young people who are so deeply moved by Eleven, her story, her personal struggles,” she added. “It's been a wild ride. Her story has resonated with so many people.”
Millie Bobby Brown says Stranger Things 5 is for everyone who loved Season 1 pic.twitter.com/CT01yIZBqj
— Netflix (@netflix) November 7, 2025
The fourth season of the science fiction series, released in 2022, ranked as the second most-watched English-language series on Netflix, with 140.7 million views, until June this year, when it was surpassed by the Emmy-winning miniseries Adolescence.
Stranger Things 5 Volume One, comprising four episodes, is set to be released on 26 November and Volume Two with three episodes on Christmas Day. The finale, titled “The Rightside Up”, will be released on the streaming platform on New Year’s Eve.
Beyond Stranger Things, Netflix announced several additions to its 2026 content pipeline over this week.
Steve Howey of Shameless joins the cast of the drama Ransom as “mountain man” Levi, the half-brother of Josh Duhamel’s Staten Kirkland whose arrival in the second season is set to complicate family, land and romantic entanglements in the Texas Hill Country setting.
The romantic western series, based on the Jodi Thomas books, follow the intersecting lives and land feuds of three ranching families in the Texas Hill Country. The series also stars Minka Kelly, Eoin Macken and Philip Winchester.
Netflix also secured Sara Waisglass, known from her role as Maxine Baker in Ginny & Georgia, in the lead role of Fiona for the film adaptation of Into the Deep Blue, based on Jennifer E Archer’s novel of the same name.
The story centres on Fiona and her friend Nick as they navigate the aftermath of their mothers’ deaths and discover their feelings for each other. The film will be directed by Jonathan Wright and star Maxton Hall actor Damian Hardung as Nick.
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