Another Stranger Things Spinoff Confirmed By Netflix (And It Should Have Happened Before Season 5)

Netflix isn’t stopping the Stranger Things train from rolling, just because the series is over. Series creators Matt and Ross Duffer have already announced an animated series spinoff, Stranger Things: Tales from ’85, which will be an interquel story about the Hawkins kids (Eleven, Mike, Will, Lucas, Dustin, and Max) set between Seasons 2 and 3 of the main show.

Now comes word that Netflix will be showcasing another Stranger Things spinoff project – but for many fans, it will likely be arriving too late. This next spinoff will tell a story that millions of fans really needed to know before they sat down to watch Stranger Things Season 5, but didn’t have access to before.

Stranger Things: The First Shadow Is (Finally) Coming to Netflix

News has broken that Netflix is going to be adding the Stranger Things Broadway Play, Stranger Things: The First Shadow, to its library… eventually. Before that happens, however, Netflix will reportedly be doing some production work on the project, ‘professionally filming’ the stage play over a week of private performances (February 10th through the 14th), according to Collider‘s exclusive reporting. The original cast of the show will reportedly return to film the Netflix feature, including Louis McCartney, T.R. Knight, Gabrielle Nevaeh, and Alex Breaux, who actually got a screen role as the brutal Lt. Robert Akers in Stranger Things‘ Final Season.

There is no current release date for The First Shadow to stream on Netflix, but one can imagine it’s not going to take forever to cut the stage play footage together and polish it so that it syncs song, dance, and cinematic splendor in a way that’s even tighter than the stage show. In 2020, Disney did something similar, filming the original cast of Hamilton for a film-style special that pulled everyone onto Disney+ during July 4th Weekend. That Hamilton feature went on to become a big success for Disney+, and Stranger Things: The First Shadow is even more highly anticipated than that release was.

Netflix Is Too Late On Doing Stranger Things: The First Shadow

The First Shadow is a prequel to the original Stranger Things series, which reveals pivotal new details about the backstory of Henry Creel, planting the seeds for how he would one day grow up to be the demonic villain known as Vecna. Along the way, we learn that the adults of Hawkins (Joyce Byers, Jim Hopper, Bob Newby, Karen Wheeler, and others) all went to school with Henry, and were involved in the dark events that ultimately got Henry sent to Hawkins Lab to be studied by Dr. Martin Brenner.

The stage play became somewhat divisive once a fraction of the fandom got to see it, and story details of the show spread online. First Shadow does major retcons to the lore of Stranger Things Seasons 1 – 3, some of which were very hard for fans to reconcile, as they sparked new questions.

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(SPOLIERS!) One of the biggest changes was revealing that Henry first encountered the Mind Flayer decades before Eleven banished him to the Upside Down: In fact, it was young Henry’s violent encounter with some of Hawkins Lab’s early research into transdimensional portals to the Upside Down that sparked Henry’s psychic abilities. It also transported him to the Upside Down, where he was promptly corrupted by the Mind Flayer. When Henry made his way back to Hawkins, he was forever influenced by the Smoke Entity’s evil. It led the young boy to use his powers horrifically, first torturing and murdering local pets, before graduating to serial killing. It’s Joyce and Hopper who team up to investigate the slayings and eventually face Henry.

If you can’t spot it from that synopsis, Stranger Things: The First Shadow‘s retcons caused some big issues with the continuity of the main show. Joyce and Hopper never mentioning their history with Henry Creel was a big one; however, the bigger issue was that the play contradicted the game-changing reveals of Stranger Things 4, confusing the lore about who the series’ true villain was: the Mind Flayer smoke entity or Henry Creel/Vecna?

The Duffer Brothers ultimately chose not to bring the stage play to a mass TV or movie theater audience before the release of Stranger Things 5 – and in hindsight, it was a big mistake. The final season had to get so heavy-handed as to