“Stranger Things” auteurs Matt and Ross Duffer spoke for the first time about their blockbuster deal with Paramount on Thursday, at Variety’s Entertainment and Technology Summit in Los Angeles. In August, the Duffers announced that their company Upside Down Pictures is leaving Netflix for an exclusive, four-year deal with Paramount for movies, television and streaming projects, and as the Duffers explained to Variety‘s Michael Schneider, the decision hinged on their desire to release a feature films in theaters.
“When Matt and I were talking about what we want to do next, it really came down to we wanted to do a movie, specifically an original movie — a big original film,” Ross Duffer said. “And theatrical is so important to us.”
He added that they hadn’t sought out a new deal — the brothers are still deep in post-production on the final season of “Stranger Things,” which premieres in November. Instead, Paramount approached them, and the prospect of theatrical distribution “is what really got us excited.”
“It’s just something we dreamed about since we were little kids,” Ross Duffer said.
While they said they specifically will be focusing on making original movies, Matt Duffer said they would be open to looking at existing properties within the Paramount umbrella “that we really respond to.” But the bar appears to be quite high.
“The market is so flooded with IP and sometimes it’s like IP that doesn’t mean anything,” Matt Duffer said. “I don’t understand that. How is that bring any value to anything? I like IP that was botched. Someone swung and missed. Then you have an opportunity to do it properly.”
The Duffers emphasized that they don’t plan on becoming prolific producers of a large stable of shows and films. “We don’t want to become like Bad Robot,” Matt Duffer said, name checking J.J. Abrams’ production company. “Ross and I are incapable of juggling that many things.” Instead, they want to emulate what 21 Laps co-head Shawn Levy did with them when he agreed to produce “Stranger Things” in 2015 even though they had zero experience creating television.
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“We like identifying really talented people and then just helping them get their vision made and then mostly staying out of the way,” Matt Duffer said.
Upside Down Pictures will also develop television projects for Paramount that focus on the “eight-to-10 episode seasons” rather than classic network shows for CBS. “I get fatigued watching 20-episode seasons,” Matt Duffer said. “We didn’t grow up interested in any of that. We only watched movies. That’s the weird thing that we ended up in TV, because we had almost zero interest in television.”
Instead, they plan on making event series akin to “Stranger Things.” “If TV shows come out every year, it’s diminishing return,” Matt Duffer said. “I like the buildup.”
The Duffers are staying in business with Netflix with two new series, “The Boroughs” and “Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen,” which are expected to debut in 2026. (“We literally just got the ‘Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen’ release date this morning,” Matt Duffer said, though he declined to say when.) “Stranger Things: Tales From ’85,” an animated series inspired by their love of Saturday morning cartoons, is also imminent. And the Duffers are expected to executive produce a spin-off of “Stranger Things” for Netflix — not as showrunners — but were circumspect about what that could be.
“We just want to make sure that if we’re gonna do it, it’s something that we’re very excited about,” Matt Duffer said. “We really are careful about what we bring to Netflix. My thing is, am I gonna be really mad at them if they pass on this?”
As for the final season of “Stranger Things,” the Duffers didn’t want to spoil much about what to expect, though Ross Duffer did say that the season premiere would launch directly into the characters’ hunting for Vecna. “This isn’t going about normal life, and then something supernatural happens to them, which is what we usually do,” he said.
The final season will be split, with the first four episodes premiering at Thanksgiving, the next three at Christmas, and the finale on Dec. 31 — a split the Duffers said they were able to write to in advance, unlike the split in Season 4 that was necessitated by the pandemic. “Episode 4 and Episode 8 are like movies,” Matt Duffer said. Though he was quick to add, “Every runtime I’ve seen posted online is inaccurate.”
When discussing their post-production process, Ross Duffer also revealed that the last thing they shot for “Stranger Things” didn’t include anyone from the cast.
“We had a close-up of a lunchbox, and we could not find it for the life of us,” he said.
“It’s a GI Joe lunchbox, and there’s a blinking red light,” Matt Duffer added. “But there is debate over whether it was actually [shot]. Everyone on the crew thinks we did shoot it and editorial claims we did not.”
“So we had to go back and shoot this close-up,” Ross Duffer said. “That was the last shot we ever shot on ‘Stranger Things,’ a lunchbox on the floor.”
From Variety US