The final season of Stranger Things ended last December, but Hawkins is not done making people smile. Netflix has released a blooper reel from the fifth and final season, packed with flubbed lines, splashed takes and cast members completely losing it on set, and it arrives on the most fitting date on the Hawkins calendar.
November 6 is Stranger Things Day, the anniversary of the night Will Byers vanished in 1983. He never made it home from a Dungeons and Dragons session at the Wheeler house, and that disappearance started everything. Netflix has marked the date every year since 2018, and in Hawkins time, 43 years have now passed since that night.
This is the first Stranger Things Day since the series wrapped, so there is no new season of the original series to tease. The reel is a farewell instead, built from footage shot while the final season was in production. Nobody filmed a reunion; these are the cast’s own outtakes, saved from the set and shared now as one more goodbye.
Millie Bobby Brown gets splashed mid-scene and dissolves into giggles, Finn Wolfhard keeps apologizing his way through forgotten lines, and Gaten Matarazzo pulls faces from the driver’s seat. Caleb McLaughlin’s cafeteria scene goes sideways when his soda erupts, cast members in full Vecna and monster prosthetics crack up between takes, and one flub renames the big bad entirely: Heckna. A clapperboard for a scene at Cedar Lodge pops up along the way, and “sorry” and “I forget my line” become the reel’s unofficial catchphrases.
Bloopers are a Stranger Things Day tradition. Netflix shared a series blooper reel on the day back in 2019, the same day the writers revealed the Season 4 premiere title, “The Hellfire Club.” The final season still rewards a second look, too: the Duffer Brothers broke down that bittersweet ending in January, and a behind-the-scenes documentary followed the making of the finale.
Between the laughs, the reel is a roll call of the final season’s cast: Brown, Wolfhard, Noah Schnapp, Matarazzo, McLaughlin and Sadie Sink, plus Joe Keery, Natalia Dyer, Charlie Heaton, Maya Hawke, Winona Ryder, David Harbour and Jamie Campbell Bower.
The bloopers turned out to be only part of the day’s celebration. Netflix also confirmed that the live-action spinoff is officially moving ahead: Other Worlds: A Stranger Things Adventure, a new series with a premiere targeted for 2028, as Entertainment Weekly reports.
The series jumps back to April 19, 1955, and the town of Marion, Nevada, before both the original series and the stage play The First Shadow. It takes on the one question the Duffers deliberately left open at the end of the final season: what young Henry Creel found in the Nevada caves, including the glowing rock and the scientist who died there.
Kate Trefry, who has been with Stranger Things since Season 2 and wrote The First Shadow, will serve as showrunner, with Joe Wright directing the first three episodes. Matt Duffer was quick to set the boundaries: the new series builds its own mythology, it is “not a spinoff about the Mind Flayer,” and the brothers do not want to set false expectations.
In their statement, the Duffers said, “We’ve been dreaming of Other Worlds: A Stranger Things Adventure for many years now,” and they pointed to what comes next: “Now, on to casting.” Their sign-off was pure Hawkins: “watch the skies, nerds!”
All five seasons of Stranger Things are streaming now on Netflix, and the story’s next chapter is due in 2028.