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'Stranger Things' season 3 details are trickling out

Netflix confirms the number of episodes and when production will start. But load up on Eggos because viewers still have a long wait.

Gael Cooper
CNET editor Gael Fashingbauer Cooper, a journalist and pop-culture junkie, is co-author of "Whatever Happened to Pudding Pops? The Lost Toys, Tastes and Trends of the '70s and '80s," as well as "The Totally Sweet '90s." She's been a journalist since 1989, working at Mpls.St.Paul Magazine, Twin Cities Sidewalk, the Minneapolis Star Tribune, and NBC News Digital. She's Gen X in birthdate, word and deed. If Marathon candy bars ever come back, she'll be first in line.
Expertise Breaking news, entertainment, lifestyle, travel, food, shopping and deals, product reviews, money and finance, video games, pets, history, books, technology history, generational studies. Credentials
  • Co-author of two Gen X pop-culture encyclopedia for Penguin Books. Won "Headline Writer of the Year"​ award for 2017, 2014 and 2013 from the American Copy Editors Society. Won first place in headline writing from the 2013 Society for Features Journalism.
Gael Cooper
2 min read
elevennetflix

Eat up, Eleven (Millie Bobby Brown). "Stranger Things" starts filming in mid-April.

Netflix

The third season of "Stranger Things" is still a year away, but details, however small, are starting to trickle out.  

The next season of Netflix's hit 1980s-set science fiction-horror series will, sadly, be one episode shorter than season 2. Netflix confirmed to CNET that season 3 will consist of eight episodes, the same as the first season. Season 2 was nine episodes long. (Although some fans intentionally may choose to forget episode 7, "The Lost Sister," a controversial story in which Eleven tracks down a mysterious fellow alum of Hawkins Lab.)

The premium streaming service also confirmed that production will begin in mid-April.

The news was first reported by TVLine.

Co-showrunner Matt Duffer has already said the third season will take place in 1985, advancing a year from the end of season 2.

"Even if we wanted to hop into the action faster, we couldn't," Duffer told The Hollywood Reporter in October. "Our kids are aging. We can only write and produce the show so fast. They're going to be almost a year older by the time we start shooting season 3. It provides certain challenges. You can't start right after season 2 ended. It forces you to do a time jump. But what I like is that it makes you evolve the show. It forces the show to evolve and change, because the kids are changing."

No release date for the third season has been confirmed, but star David Harbour (police Chief Jim Hopper) has said it'll "probably" be 2019, which makes sense based on an April filming start.

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