The ‘Stranger Things’ Spinoff Won’t Just Be More ‘Stranger Things’

Stranger Things season five is still over a month away and while fans are very curious to see how the storyline in Hawkins wraps up, there might be even more curiosity about the spin-off that creators Matt and Ross Duffer have been dropping hints about for a while.

The brothers may have recently moved their operations from Netflix to Paramount, but the spinoff, which they will create and have a hand in but won’t showrun, will remain at the streamer. And that’s… just about all we know about it, though we now have a better idea of what not to expect.

Season five, the Duffers emphasized to Variety, will wrap up the tale of Eleven and company with finality. The spin-off, therefore, won’t continue with any of the characters we’ve met in Stranger Things, nor will it follow any threads that were introduced in the world of that show. It won’t be, they insist, like another franchise that’s found great success with interconnected stories.

“It’s so different than something like Star Wars,” Matt Duffer told the trade. “It doesn’t really work like that.”

What is a spinoff if not that, you ask?

The Duffers see it as more of a brand expansion that leans into their “style of storytelling,” broadly including “kids, adventures, sci-fi/fantasy, rather than increasingly [expanding] what could become an increasingly convoluted mytholody.”

Which means, according to Ross Duffer, “They’re going to live in a bit of a different world. There’s going to be connective tissue, but you’re almost anthologizing in a way. Because we’re not Star Wars. We can’t be like, ‘Oh, now we’re on this planet.’”

This approach is more creatively freeing for the duo. “You’re starting with new characters—it’s like clean slate. You’re not tied up into any knots. There’s something refreshing about it … the hope is you’re not just doing something to just do it.”

While we wait to see what that same-but-also-different project looks like, Stranger Things season five is nearly upon us. The first batch of episodes arrives November 26 on Netflix.

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