Stranger Things‘ Creators Revealed Whether We’ll See Eleven, Will & Other Characters in the Spinoffs—It’ll Address ‘Loose Ends’
Now that the main story has come to a close, the Duffer Brothers are ready to go full force with the new Stranger Things spinoffs.
Season 5 of the beloved Netflix sci-fi thriller marked the end of an era with Eleven, Mike, Dustin, Lucas, Max, and Will, and their victorious defeat against Vecna. Even though Eleven got the ambiguous ending while the main gang graduated high school and set out for life beyond Hawkins, there’s still a lot of the story to be told.
Related: The Highest Paid Stranger Things Cast Member May Surprise You…
The Stranger Things Universe (“Strangerverse?” creator Ross Duffer pondered as an alternative) isn’t a stranger to relative offshoots of the main story. In 2025, a West End and Broadway play titled Stranger Things: The First Shadow delves into what happened in Hawkins decades before the Upside Down became a prominent place in the Indiana town.
Are there Stranger Things spinoffs in the works?
Yes, the Duffer Brothers confirmed they’re working on a Stranger Things spinoff after Netflix gave the greenlight in November 2025.
In an interview with Variety, the creators of the show elaborated that the stone in the briefcase could be a key to understanding what the spinoffs have in store. “It’s a completely different mythology,” Matt explained. “So it’s not a deep exploration of the Mind Flayer or anything like that. It’s very fresh and very new, but yes, it will answer some of the loose threads that are remaining.”
As for whether we’ll see the old Hawkins gang, the brothers said that there’s no chance. “You’re starting with new characters — it’s like clean slate,” Matt told Variety. “You’re not tied up into any knots. There’s something refreshing about it.”
In April 2025, Netflix confirmed an animated series of a Stranger Things spinoff, Stranger Things Tales of ’85, to premiere in 2026. It features the original characters but voiced with a different cast. The Duffer Brothers developed the idea “because we grew up loving some of the cartoons that were based on movies that we love, like Beetlejuice and Ghostbusters.” They envisioned capturing the “throwback” of those franchises in a more modern way.
