Netflix Sets a Stranger Things Prequel for 2028

Netflix has announced Other Worlds: A Stranger Things Adventure, a live-action spinoff of its Stranger Things franchise, expected to debut in 2028, according to The Verge.

The series is a prequel set in the 1950s. It sits before Stranger Things itself and before the stage play Stranger Things: The First Shadow, so the timeline runs backward from the screen series that built the franchise rather than forward from its most recent installment.

The Duffer brothers, the creators of the franchise, are involved in the project. Kate Trefry will serve as showrunner, the writer-producer who runs the series day to day. Joe Wright is set to direct the first three episodes. Those roles are announced commitments, and the production has not yet reached a premiere, so the 2028 date should be read as a target rather than a confirmed release.

The prequel is not the franchise's first move into other formats. In 2022, Variety reported that a Stranger Things stage play was in the works at Netflix alongside the spinoff series, and that the Duffer brothers had lined up multiple projects within the show's world. Netflix's own Tudum page lists further upcoming projects from the brothers, including Stranger Things: Tales From '85, The Boroughs and Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen.

The broader context here is a franchise managed as a set of linked properties rather than a single series. For a streamer, a recognizable world that extends across episodic drama, theatre and a chronological prequel offers several points of entry for an audience. It also lets a new production borrow an established setting without advancing the existing storyline. The 1950s setting is the design choice that stands out most in the announcement. It moves the story into a period the current series has only referenced, which requires the writers to build history for characters and places viewers already know.

In my view, the risk is familiar to anyone who has watched a successful show spawn a crowded slate. Each new property draws on the same mythology and the same audience attention, and each spinoff has to justify its place on its own terms. A prequel carries one built-in constraint: its story has a fixed endpoint in the existing canon. Whether the 2028 timeline holds, and whether the stage and screen projects reinforce one another, will become clear over the next few years.

What the announcement makes possible is a longer runway than a single season could offer. A prequel built as a dedicated production, with a showrunner and director already attached, gives the Duffer brothers and Netflix room to test how far a fictional universe can stretch across formats while keeping its internal logic intact.