Stranger Things Star Was Told the Show Wouldn't Last

Before Stranger Things premiered on Netflix literally no one could have predicted that it would become a dominating force in pop culture. The series seemed to come out of nowhere and its explosive love letter to the 1980s would send shockwaves through Hollywood, influencing major hits like the IT remake, Ghostbusters: Afterlife, and the upcoming Firestarter. While filming was underway on the first season though hopes weren't high, even if the first footage from the series drew the cast and crew in to believing in the show as a viable story. Speaking in a new interview, series star Gaten Matarazzo revealed that while working on the first season he was told not to expect a second.

"We went into this on stage at Screen Gems in Georgia. There's this back room..it was an empty little space, an empty little room and they brought this rinky dink little tv out there with just a regular DVD and a DVD player that had a rough cut of the first episode of the show," Matarazzo said on Inside of You with Michael Rosenbaum podcast when asked about the first time he saw the series. "A lot of the editing hadn't been finished at all, there were still like shots in which you could still see the green screen, it wasn't even edited out. They had music put together, a rough cut of the music. It was just a rough draft of what the show was going to look like but they put so much work into that. All of us were in it, all the cast, the crew everybody, was there on that day. It was pretty small at the time and we just sat down and we we watched it and i just still remember every single moment of it to this day, six years ago."

He added, "We kept getting told 'Enjoy while it lasts, because it's probably not going to get a season two' and we just watched it and just knew we were like 'Okay we're in good hands we're safe, this is worthwhile.'"

Worthwhile is the right word as Stranger Things is getting ready to release its fourth season later this year, arriving in two batches of episodes, and has already been renewed for a fifth and final by the streamer. Netflix is also reportedly considering their options for spinoffs. Pretty big for something that wouldn't last, huh?