Stranger Things star Finn Wolfhard revealed the cast and crew working on the final season of the hit Netflix series were “pretty worried” about getting “torn to shreds”, like the last season of Game of Thrones.
Wolfhard, 22, has played Mike Wheeler on the sci-fi drama since 2015, alongside child co-stars Millie Bobby Brown, Gaten Matarazzo, Caleb McLaughlin, and since 2017, Sadie Sink.
Stranger Things, created by Matt Duffer and Ross Duffer, is set in the 1980s in the fictional small town of Hawkins, Indiana, and follows the town’s residents after a young girl with psychokinetic abilities opens a gateway between Earth and an alternate dimension known as the Upside Down.
Winona Ryder, David Harbour, Joe Keery, Natalia Dyer, Charlie Heaton, Maya Hawke, and Jamie Campbell Bower also star in the series.
“I think everyone was pretty worried, honestly,” Wolfhard told Time magazine.
“The way that Game of Thrones got torn to shreds in that final season, we’re all walking into this going, ‘We hope to not have that kind of thing happen’. But then we read the scripts. We knew that it was something special.”
HBO’s Game of Thrones aired its eighth and final season in 2019, with a finale considered to be one of the most hated in TV history. Many, including those associated with the show, like Conleth Hill, complained the truncated final season felt like a rush job.
Director Neil Marshall, who worked on key episodes in the final season, said he agreed “with a lot of the criticism that it was really rushed”. “Everyone ended up where they were meant to end up but they got there in a little bit of a rush.”
A petition calling on HBO to remake the final season with “competent writers” was launched by one disgruntled person, and more than 1.8 million people signed it.
The Independent’s critic called the final episode “misjudged and hammy”, and criticised the finale for “lacking emotional resolution”. Emilia Clarke, whose character Daenerys finally perished during the episode, has said “it was a f***ing struggle reading the scripts” but that the character’s final moments were “very taken care of… it’s a very beautiful and touching ending”.
Stranger Things co-creator Ross Duffer said that they were “nervous” about the series’ fourth season, which reportedly cost $270m to film. “It was such a relief when it got the viewership it did because you don't want to scale down for your final season.”
The fourth season held the spot for the second most-watched English-language TV series on Netflix at 140.7 million views until June this year, when it was surpassed by the Emmy-winning UK miniseries Adolescence, with 141.2 million total views.
Matt Duffer talked about ideas for a potential expansion of the Stranger Things franchise, now that the series is coming to an end.
“I’m kind of surprised there hasn’t been more pressure [from Netflix],” he said. “They would love us to go in and pitch it, but they haven’t forced us to do it.”
In April, Wolfhard said he had mixed emotions when he learned about the fate of his character on the show.
“I was so happy with his ending, and I don’t know, I was satisfied, but I was also very confused and sad, but also very happy,” he told People.
The Duffer Brothers teased last month that the final season will include “one of the biggest, craziest episodes that we’ve ever done.”
“The thing we’re really excited about with this season is that, really from the very beginning of it, our characters are active,” Ross Duffer said at the Variety Entertainment & Technology Summit in Los Angeles.
“This isn’t going about normal life and then something supernatural happens to them, which is what we usually do. They have to solve this mystery. This is them active, which is exciting. They're going [into] ‘on a mission mode’ in episode one, which is great.”
“Those first four episodes, which release on Thanksgiving, are really building to one of the biggest, craziest episodes that we've ever done.”
Stranger Things 5 Volume one, comprising four episodes, will be released on 26 November. Volume two will then be released on Christmas Day and contains the next three episodes. The finale, which is titled “The Rightside Up”, will then be shared on the platform on New Year’s Eve.
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