Netflix Orders 1950s ‘Stranger Things’ Prequel ‘Other Worlds’ for 2028

The latest:

Netflix has given a straight-to-series order to Other Worlds: A Stranger Things Adventure, a prequel arriving in 2028, Variety reported. The announcement landed on Stranger Things Day, the annual Nov. 6 marker of Will Byers’ disappearance in 1983. A teaser places the new show in 1955 in Marion, Nevada, years before the events of the stage play The First Shadow.

Details:

• The creative team: The series is co-created by Matt and Ross Duffer with Kate Trefry, a Stranger Things writer since Season 2 who also wrote the stage production The First Shadow. Trefry serves as showrunner and executive producer. Joe Wright will direct the first three episodes and executive produce.
• The producers: Shawn Levy of 21 Laps, Paul Dichter, Shelley Meals, Andrea Sperling and Pavlina Hatoupis are also executive producing, with the Duffers producing under their Upside Down Pictures banner. Production is set for New Mexico, though no filming start date was announced.
• The premise: Plot specifics remain thin. In an interview tied to the flagship finale, the Duffers indicated the spinoff would center on events preceding Henry Creel’s exposure to the otherworldly substance that granted him his powers. Casting has not begun, and no characters have been named publicly.
• The franchise map: Other Worlds becomes the fourth Stranger Things project. The others are the mothership series, which concluded at the end of 2025; the animated Stranger Things: Tales from ’85; and the stage show The First Shadow, which explores Henry Creel’s backstory as Vecna.
• The studio deal: The series is structured as a carve-out from the Duffers’ current overall deal at Paramount. The brothers were previously under an overall deal at Netflix; in 2025 it was announced they would move to Paramount in an arrangement covering film, television and streaming once the Netflix pact expired in April 2026.
• The Duffers’ pitch: The brothers said they had been dreaming of the project for years and described seeing it ordered as surreal and exhilarating. They promised a new setting with new heroes and villains, then said they were not permitted to disclose more, adding that casting comes next.
• Netflix’s framing: Jinny Howe, Netflix Head of Scripted Series, US and Canada, said the franchise has always belonged to the fans and that the streamer is giving them a new dimension of the universe to step into, naming the Duffers, Trefry, Levy and Wright as partners.
• The showrunner: Trefry said the Duffers gave her her first paying job in Hollywood and called leading the new chapter an honor. She said the team returned to the horror, wonder and mystery of the flagship while telling a wholly new story, adding: “There are so many more mysteries to explore.”
• The timeline: The spinoff was first reported to be in development in 2022, making the series order the culmination of roughly four years of development. A 2028 debut would place it three years after the flagship series ended its run.

Background:

Stranger Things became one of Netflix’s defining global hits before concluding at the end of 2025. Its mythology centers on Hawkins, Indiana, and on Henry Creel, the character who becomes the villain Vecna, whose origins the franchise has been progressively filling in across stage and screen.

Between the lines:

The deal structure is the detail doing the most work. Netflix is keeping its most valuable scripted franchise in-house through a carve-out even as the Duffers move their overall deal to Paramount, letting the streamer retain the universe without retaining its creators exclusively. Handing day-to-day control to Trefry, who wrote The First Shadow, points to a franchise built to run beyond the brothers themselves.

What’s next

Casting is the next concrete step, with the Duffers saying it begins now. Watch for a New Mexico production start date, the first announced cast members, and whether Netflix slots the 2028 debut against remaining franchise titles.