Exclusive: Stranger Things Creators In Talks For Star Wars Show
Our sources tell us the Duffer Brothers are in talks with Lucasfilm to make a Disney+ Star Wars show.
While they aren’t leaving the narrative behind completely, Matt and Ross Duffer will soon be bringing fans the final season of the hit Netflix series Stranger Things. Apparently not long afterward they’ll be turning their gaze upward. Our trusted and proven source informs us that the Stranger Things creators are currently in talks with Lucasfilm for an upcoming Star Wars show for Disney+. If negotiations go well, the brothers would presumably begin work on the series some time after the Netflix series concludes.
We don’t know what show the Duffer brothers are in talks to bring to Disney+; nor do we know if this is an original idea the Duffers brought to Lucasfilm, the other way around, or if the studio is simply looking to bring big name creators into its stable like Taika Waititi and Patty Jenkins. Considering most of the heroes of Stranger Things are children, one might assume that a natural fit for the Duffers would be Star Wars: Skeleton Crew. Jude Law (Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore) will lead the series which will feature four children who are lost in space. In fact, the series has already been compared to Stranger Things as a show that features kids but isn’t for kids. However, Skeleton Crew began filming a couple of months ago with Jon Watts (Spider-Man: No Way Home) creating and executive producing. So–unless Watts is leaving the project just as he left Marvel’s Fantastic Four–it seems likely the Duffers will be working on something else.
The Duffers seem a natural fit for a Star Wars project. The saga of Stranger Things begins the same year the original Star Wars trilogy ends, and the Duffer brothers have already been clear about the influence the space saga of George Lucas has had on the Netflix series. The creators have said that the dark finales to both this year’s Season 4 (per Collider) and 2019’s Season 3 (per SyFy) were inspired by 1980’s The Empire Strikes Back.
One tantalizing possibility is that Lucasfilm wants the guys who helped make Stranger Things one of Netflix’s biggest success stories bring Star Wars into the world of horror. There’s been whispers for a while that both Star Wars and Star Trek are looking to get into what The Misfits might call the “Horror Business.” All the elements of a horror story are ready and waiting in George Lucas’s mythos. There are already perfectly memorable moments in the films that feel like they could’ve come right from a horror flick. There’s the scene in Empire Strikes Back when the heroes search what they believe is the inside of a cave but proves to be the innards of a massive beast; there’s the nightmarish creatures that are set loose on Han Solo’s freighter in The Force Awakens; there’s the Rancor in Jedi, the Wampa in Empire, and, of course, the Force itself whose Dark Side can look a lot what a Stranger Things villain like Vecna uses (and certainly at times what the hero Eleven uses as well).
