Dungeons and Dragons Was Originally Not Supposed to be a Big Part of ‘Stranger Things,’ According to Creators

The end is here. Nearly a decade since Netflix’s biggest series first premiered, Stranger Things is finally hurtling towards the two-part series finale with an epic Season 5. As we prepare for the first half to drop on November 26, Collider’s Steve Weintraub sat down with the creators, the Duffer Brothers, Matt and Ross, to look back at their legacy and look forward to the future.

When we last left Hawkins, Vecna (Jamie Campbell Bower) had succeeded in bringing the Upside Down into their world. Now, the town is under lockdown, and with Eleven (Millie Bobby Brown) in hiding, the whole team has to come together again for one last stand against this deadly horde. Season 5 brings back its all-star cast, including Noah Schnapp, Finn Wolfhard, Caleb McLaughlin, Gaten Matarazzo, Sadie Sink, Winona Ryder, David Harbour, Joe Keery, Maya Hawke, Natalia Dyer, and Charlie Heaton.

In this conversation, the Duffer Brothers revisit the “mass hysteria” that followed Season 4, putting rumors to rest, and explaining how they avoided similar challenges with Season 5. They also reveal that a crucial plot detail was never supposed to be so important to the show and discuss what fans can expect from the season finale and what they’re working on next.

The Duffer Brothers Are Going “Big and Original” After ‘Stranger Things’

We’re just not the best multitaskers.

COLLIDER: I have a million questions. You guys are going to be making a movie at some point. What’s it about?

ROSS DUFFER: Honestly, I swear to God, we do not know. We’ve been so entrenched. This season is so big, and it’s been really taking up every moment of our time, so we don’t know. We will say, though, that we want it to be a big original movie. I think there’s a space for that, and I think people are people are craving it. So, that’s about as far as we’ve got.

MATT DUFFER: Yeah. It’s not going to be an indie drama, you know what I mean?

I never thought that.

MATT DUFFER: We’re just not the best multitaskers. That’s the truth. So, we had to kind of hyper-focus. So at some point, we’ll hyper-focus on that.

By the way, I think that’s why the show is so awesome is because you’re not doing eight different things at the same time.

D&D Accidentally Became Central to ‘Stranger Things’

“We grew up actually playing Magic: The Gathering.”

Stranger Things: Billy playing Dungeons and Dragons

So now that you’ve made Season 5, at any point in writing of Season 5 and the making of Season 5, were you like, “God, I wish we had done this one thing in the first four seasons to help us set up this?”

MATT DUFFER: No, it’s been perfect and all perfectly placed. [Laughs] No, of course. Of course, you do. But that was sort of the fun and the challenge of it was going, “Okay, what are these loose ends that we need to tie up? What is worth revisiting? How do we make sure that when people watch it from beginning to end, once the whole show is out there, people are going to be able to watch it all in a run in a relatively short period of time?” We just want to make sure that it all feels coherent. That was something we spent a lot of time working on this year.

Is there a D&D villain that you really wanted to include but couldn’t?

ROSS DUFFER: Oh, man, we did talk about a lot of them. I can’t remember. Was it Vlad? Here’s the weird thing: we grew up actually playing Magic: The Gathering. We did dabble in D&D, but my knowledge is embarrassingly low, considering how important it is to the show.

MATT DUFFER: Well, it wasn’t actually supposed to be that big a part of the show. It’s just the kids were going to be playing D&D, and then they needed reference points to talk about and understand what was going on. We’d established them playing D&D, and it just became, increasingly, a bigger part of the show.

ROSS DUFFER: But Vecna is like the grandaddy. That’s the big one. We cheated the time frame just a little bit because we’re like, “It has to be Vecna.”

MATT DUFFER: I mean, Thessalhydra would have been cool, even just as a callback. I don’t remember where we had the Thessalhydra. It was definitely in it, though.

ROSS DUFFER: Yes. Season 1, I think.

The Duffer Brothers Address Rumors After ‘Stranger Things’ Season 4

“It was like mass hysteria.”

Image via Netflix 

I remember when we spoke for the last season, you were finishing VFX the day it was going to be uploaded to the server, so I’m just curious where you’re at in the editing VFX process of the last four episodes.

MATT DUFFER: We are doing better, Steve. It wouldn’t take much to do better, but now everything is on time and under control.

ROSS DUFFER: Well, we did make some little last-minute tweaks to the first volume, like, two weeks ago.

MATT DUFFER: Yeah, but that was sound, not visual effects.

ROSS DUFFER: No. No visual effects. We just made a few little sound tweaks. I don’t know. Matt and I have a hard time letting something go. At a certain point, though, Netflix is like, “No, it has to be in or you’re going to risk the dubbing and stuff for the international audience.”

MATT DUFFER: We take it right up to the line of being risky. Like Season 4, I will say we crossed that line to the point where it actually was risky. This year, we’ve stopped before we hit that point because that is scary.

I remember talking to you guys the day it was going up, and you’re like, “Yeah, the final VFX are being uploaded today, so if you watch it at six in the morning, you’re going to see it not finalized.

ROSS DUFFER: That’s right.

MATT DUFFER: I don’t know if it was your interview, but it led to all these sorts of conspiracy theories about us going back and changing previous seasons. Like going George Lucas crazy on it. Like, there was a scene with Jonathan that we deleted… It was like mass hysteria. No, we would never do that. It upsets me so much when people do that.

ROSS DUFFER: It’s like The Berenstain Bears thing.

So there was a lot of talk that every episode this season was going to be like a movie or longer than a movie, and the first three episodes, it’s like 106, 50-something, 106. How long are those last four episodes? Have you shared that?

MATT DUFFER: No, we haven’t shared. Episode 4 is on the longer side. I think the only episode that breaks an hour and a half is the final episode, which is two hours.

ROSS DUFFER: A little over two hours.

MATT DUFFER: So I don’t know exactly it got out that every episode was going to be like a movie.

ROSS DUFFER: I think we said it.

MATT DUFFER: No! Let’s dig up that evidence. I don’t think we said that.

ROSS DUFFER: We did not say it was movie length. We said “like a movie.”

MATT DUFFER: The season is like a mega-movie. Anyway, whatever. I think a lot of the internet has spread those. Anyway, I don’t know whether some people are going to be disappointed that they’re shorter than they expected, and some people are going to relieved that it’s not, like, 30 hours that they have to watch.

For myself, and I speak for the planet, there are people who are so invested in these characters that if the episodes were two hours each, I’d be in, and if the episodes are an hour each, I’m in.

MATT DUFFER: If they were two hours each, I would not be here. I’d be dead.

‘Stranger Things’ Will Be a Cathartic Ending for Longtime Fans

“They’re going to go on the same journey that these characters went on.”

I want to compare Stranger Things to Lost a little bit, because Damon [Lindelof] and Carlton [Cuse] and everybody on Lost wanted to end the show sooner, but ABC was like, “No, you’re keeping it on the air.” With something like Stranger Things, which is the most popular TV show on Netflix, how did you guys figure out it’s going to be five seasons? Were you ever figuring out the balance of commerce, the popularity, and the story, making you guys happy and also Netflix happy?

ROSS DUFFER: Believe it or not, and I swear there was not a lot of pressure to keep the show going longer than we felt, it was always, “When do you guys think it would end?” Because we had talked after Season 2 that we thought it was going to be four and out, and then as we started breaking the seasons, we realized that we needed more time. But there was no pressure to continue. Maybe had, after Season 1, we’d said, “That’s it,” there would have been pressure. But for us, they gave us the freedom to tell the story we wanted to tell in the amount of time we needed to tell it, as evidenced by Season 4 is a really, really long season, and that’s the time we needed to tell that story.

MATT DUFFER: It sounds like you’re a Netflix shill, but that’s true. Everything he’s saying is actually the truth. It’s amazing. But more studios should treat their shows like this because it’s not good to force it to go beyond what’s natural.

Yeah, I think Lost is amazing, but I know it would have been better if it had been a year or two.

MATT DUFFER: Right, right, right.

ROSS DUFFER: 100%.

My last thing for you I got from Tania [Hussain], who writes for Collider. How do you hope this final season reframes the legacy of Stranger Things for fans who’ve grown up alongside it?

ROSS DUFFER: Oh, man. Really, the show at its heart is a coming-of-age story, and what’s been interesting about watching it evolve over the years is that the fans have also grown up with it. So, there’s something going on with the show where it’s the characters are coming of age and having to let go of childhood and having to say goodbye, and the same thing happened with our actors. I think for a lot of the fans who have been with this since the beginning and maybe started out pretty young, or the age of our characters, watching it, I think they’re going to go on the same journey that these characters went on and the same journey that our actors went through. So hopefully there’s a bit of catharsis, just like it was for all of us, as we reach the end of this story.

MATT DUFFER: Everything comes to an end.

Stranger Things Season 5, Volume 1 premieres on Netflix on November 26.

Release Date

2016 – 2025-00-00

Network

Netflix

•