After just one season, Stranger Things found itself as one of the most popular Netflix original series (or TV series, period). With just a couple months between now and the highly anticipated second season, Netflix has already greenlit a third. It’s not surprising, given the series’ popularity. Fans may be closer to the end of the story than they realize, however.
Speaking to Vulture, series creators Ross and Matt Duffer confirmed the show would be returning for a third season, which is sure to please fans hoping for the show to continue on past season 2. They also gave their estimation that season four will be the final for the series — at least that’s their current outlook based on how the story is shaping up.
The interview also touches on what to expect from season 2. The Duffer brothers modeled the season after film classic sequels. Ross Duffer told Vulture, “I told Matt, ‘I don’t want to call it season 2, I just want it to feel like a movie sequel.’ If you have a successful movie, No. 2 is always a little bit bigger.”
The end of season 1 saw the previously vanished Will Byers reunited with his friends and family, but with his return the barrier between our world and the Upside Down seems to be even more permeable and flimsy. Based upon the details of the new season’s first trailer, the experience has left a permanent mark on Will’s psyche, which is certain to play a part in his character development throughout the season as he tries to return to a normal life. Plus, there’s the whole puking monster-slugs into the sink thing. Meanwhile, Eleven has gone missing, seemingly trapped in the Upside Down after destroying the alternate dimension monster, the Demigorgon, to save her friends. (For the curious, prevailing theories about season 2 explore these ideas further.)
It also sounds like the town of Hawkins will experience terrors much worse than anything in season 1. While the show has become beloved for its setting and characters, which channel the light-hearted-yet-thrilling films of directors like Steven Spielberg, the Duffer brothers have stated that season 2 will be much darker and more dramatic. “We wanted to push things a bit,” Ross Duffer said.
We’re only a couple months from finding out exactly what that means. Stranger Things season 2 will be available to stream on Netflix starting October 27.
China just gave Hollywood a cautionary tale about AI filmmaking. Sanxingdui: Future Past, billed as the country's first fully AI-generated movie, hit theaters on October 23 and bombed at the box office.
According to Futurism, the film's reported $1.5 million production budget landed on more than 10,000 screens. Yet it pulled in only about $181,000, averaging roughly $20 per screen, making the budget difficult to recover.
Some of the best shots in Grok Imagine’s AI-made Odyssey don’t contain actors. Ancient landscapes stretch into the distance. Close-ups of grimy hands suggest people who have touched something rougher than a keyboard. For a few seconds, the illusion holds.
https://twitter.com/imagine/status/2113712964419063911
YouTube videos could soon look better without eating quite so much data, right? Thankfully, the platform plans to introduce a new video format called AV2 on its web player in early 2027, promising more efficient streaming and potentially fewer playback hiccups on slower internet connections. The big headline is a roughly 30% improvement in compression efficiency over AV1, YouTube's existing video format. That doesn't guarantee every video will use 30% less data, but it could make streaming a little easier on both internet connections and data allowances.
What is AV2, and why should viewers care?