Stranger Things 4 began breaking records, thanks to a darker plot that anticipated the end of one of Netflix’s star productions.

Stranger Things swept the premiere of its new season: the first volume of its fourth installment, released on May 27 on Netflix, was the most viewed in 83 countries by users of the platform during its first weekend, with 287 million hours played, thus achieving the best debut in history on the platform, as confirmed by the company.

Stranger Things is one of the jewels produced by Netflix, and the data supports it: volume I of its fourth season exceeded the record reached in 2021 by the premiere of the fifth season of La Casa de Papel and that of the second season of The Bridgertons, with 201 million and 193 million hours of playback, respectively.

The creation of the brothers Matt and Ross Duffer, produced by Monkey Massacre Productions and 21 Laps Entertainment, and with the Duffers themselves as executive producers along with Shawn Levy and Dan Cohen (21 Laps Entertainment), Iain Paterson and Curtis Gwinn, has ahead the challenge of surpassing the South Korean The Squid Game in the medium term, Netflix’s biggest hit with more than 1.6 billion hours watched in its first month.

Since its premiere in 2016, Stranger Things has received more than 65 awards and 175 nominations, including Emmy, Golden Globe, Grammy, SAG, DGA, PGA, WGA, BAFTA, a Peabody, the AFI Award for Program of the Year, the People’s Choice, the MTV Movie & TV Awards, the Teen Choice Awards.

New supernatural threat

In the new installment of Stranger Things, six months have passed since the battle of Starcourt, which sowed terror and destruction in Hawkins, and for the first time in the series we see the gang of friends separated: some are still in Hawkins, others are They have gone to California, but they all try to recover from the events they experienced and, incidentally, survive high school.

As Eleven (Millie Bobby Brown), Joyce (Winona Ryder), Will (Noah Schnapp), and Jonathan Byers (Charlie Heaton) start a new life in California, Mike (Finn Wolfhard), Dustin (Gaten Matarazzo), Lucas (Caleb McLaughlin), Max (Sadie Sink), Erica (Priah Ferguson), Nancy (Natalia Dyer) and Steve (Joe Keery) are still in Hawkins.

On the other hand, somewhere remote in Russia an old acquaintance will face the Demogorgon again, which hints that the creature could be a creation of the Russians.

As expected, once the previous danger has been defeated, a new and terrifying supernatural threat arises in Hawkins, Vecna, a mystery that, if the gang is able to solve, would finally end the horrors that emerged from the Upside Down, a World of the Revés that again is full of references to the horror movies of the 1980s throughout the seven episodes already released.

The Duffers assured months ago that the season would be “bigger than ever”, but already in February, they anticipated that the fourth installment would be “the beginning of the end” of a story whose plot arc they had already thought of seven years ago.

“There are still plenty of exciting stories to tell from the world of Stranger Things; new mysteries, new adventures, and new heroes ”, they had warned for the new season, which arrives three years after the previous one, after filming was interrupted as a result of the pandemic.

“It’s darker and more terrifying. I think it’s definitely the scariest season. I remember that from the moment we read the scripts we realized that it was going to be intense, “said Natalia Dyer – who plays Nancy Wheeler, a character who gains prominence in the new installment of Stranger Things – in the presentation of the series in Madrid.

In the fourth part, the story becomes darker and more terrifying, and also more ambitious, with longer episodes and recovering one of the great successes of horror movies of the 1980s, A Nightmare on Elm Street, not only because of the way in which the new threat to Hawkins terrifies its victims but because one of the key characters in the plot, Victor Creel, is played by actor Robert Englund, who played a terrifying Freddy Krueger.

Other new additions include actors Jamie Campbell Bower as Peter Ballard, Joseph Quinn as Eddie Munson, and Tom Wlaschiha as Dimitri.