The Duffer Brothers have put an end to a popular fan theory that the events in Stranger Things are not *actually* happening.
The runaway hit show, which has been a flagship series on Netflix since its inception in 2016, will draw to a close with a fifth season, speculated to drop in late 2025 or early 2026.
Created by brothers Matt and Ross Duffer, Stranger Things has gripped fans since its debut, and made huge stars of its principally younger cast, including the likes of Millie Bobby Brown, Sadie Sink and Finn Wolfhard.
Though the premiere date for the final instalment has yet to be revealed, with filming having been delayed significantly by the SAG-AFTRA strike of this year, one thing that has been confirmed is that the fantastical events that occur throughout the show are most definitely real.
As revealed to Metro at the premiere of the West End spin-off of the TV show, Matt and Ross Duffer clarified that the fan theory that most of the action in the series is happening in one long game of Dungeons & Dragons was incorrect.
The theory has been in circulation for a good long while, but picked up steam again last summer around the end of season four of the show.
Fans theorise that the show’s main characters – Will Byers, Mike Wheeler, Lucas Sinclair and Dustin Henderson – are in fact playing the same game of Dungeons & Dragons that they were playing in Mike’s basement at the beginning of season one.
Therefore, events like Eleven coming onto the scene and Vecna’s mass destruction never actually occurred.
Dungeons & Dragons is certainly a big motif in Stranger Things – from the friends using the game as a metaphor to understand what’s happening to their small town in season one, to the many monsters that appear throughout the show which are largely plucked from the popular tabletop game.
However, when confronted with this particular theory on the red carpet of Stranger Things: The First Shadow, Ross Duffer said “that would be the equivalent of, ‘that’s all a dream’... No, I assure you that is not how we’re going to end the show.”
Duffer continued “we’ve known where we’ve been going for a while. And we feel comfortable with it; hopefully, it satisfies everyone. We’ll see.”
Stranger Things season four finished streaming on 1 July 2022, and quickly became Netflix’s most popular English-language TV series ever, with a total of 781.04M hours viewed in 17 days. It has since been usurped by Wednesday.
In an interview with QG, Wolfhard revealed that the highly anticipated final season would most likely be released in early 2025, although this has not been confirmed by Netflix.