Batfleck & Stranger Things Return – Did You Hear? Week of August 21st, 2020

Did You Hear? is a weekly examination of headlines in the entertainment industry and a take on what they could mean for the future of the industry and (often), the little geeky bubble that we occupy!

Stranger Things Season 4 Plans

If you listened to this week’s Major Spoilers Podcast episode we chatted a bit about Stranger Things’ journey back to Netflix. In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter series creators Ross & Matt Duffer admitted they weren’t sure when the hit series would be returning to streaming given the current state of American film productions.

Everyone’s excited to get back to work, but the priority is the safety of the cast and crew, and that will dictate when we go back.

… said Ross Duffer

Added Matt Duffer:

We’ve had a lot more time to work on the scripts. For the first time, we have all the scripts written and we’re able to look at it as a whole piece and make adjustments.

And Ross Duffer did go on to confirm Season 4 would not be the end:

Season four won’t be the end. We know what the end is, and we know when it is. [The pandemic] has given us time to look ahead, figure out what is best for the show. Starting to fill that out gave us a better idea of how long we need to tell that story.

Many of us have assumed each season of Stranger Things we get is going to be the last one. Viewers will remember from jump Netflix announced Stranger Things as an anthology series. The only reason this cast has continued on in the course of the show is due to their popularity with audiences. It seems the Duffers and Netflix have more for the audience than we may have initially dared hope for.

Format shifts also come with tone shifts, it seems. Ross Duffer told THR the upcoming season of Stranger Things would be – to borrow a popular social media term – less spoopy than before:

We want each season to feel different, as opposed to re-creating the same thing over and over again. With season three, we realized early on that we were going to shoot mostly in the summer and that it would be released in the summer. Automatically, that gave it this very different feel in terms of both the tone and the colors. We wanted it very saturated, and we wanted this season to feel like the big Hollywood summer blockbusters that we grew up with and loved so much. There’s a little more humor in it, a little more action, and it just has a different feel than the past two seasons, which were set in the fall and a little more dreary and scary.

As the cast continues to grow it appears Stranger Things as an autonomous entity won’t shy away from change either! Jump down to the comments section to share your hopes, dreams & predictions for Stranger Things season 4!

Batfleck’s Back!

DC Fandome is taking place as I write this for you. This is the debut event of its kind amidst swirling rumours about the state and health of DC Comics and Warner Bros. at this time. Fans predicted everything from no announcements whatsoever to every announcement under the sun we didn’t get a couple weeks ago during #ComicConAtHome and it appears DC definitely delivered on the former.

(before anyone jumps into the comments, DC Fandome is technically only slated for this coming Saturday, but news is bound to break and swirl all weekend as a result of this event)

Yesterday it was revealed former Batman actor Ben Affleck will be reprising his role one last time (cue the Hamilton song!), in the upcoming The Flash.

For a long time we’ve heard The Flash will be heavily inspired by Flashpoint (a version of which Arrowverse fans saw several years ago on the CW’s The Flash), which deals with alternate reality DC Universes. Social media is already a twitter with conjecture Affleck’s Batman will die during the course of The Flash only for the Dark Knight to rise again with The Batman’s Robert Pattinson under the cowl.

In an interview with Vanity Fair The Flash’s latest of many directors, Andy Muschietti, revealed Affleck only signed onto the project last week after reading the latest draft of the script. Muschietti went on to say:

He’s a very substantial part of the emotional impact of the movie. The interaction and relationship between Barry and Affleck’s Wayne will bring an emotional level that we haven’t seen before,” the director said. “It’s Barry’s movie, it’s Barry’s story, but their characters are more related than we think. They both lost their mothers to murder, and that’s one of the emotional vessels of the movie. That’s where the Affleck Batman kicks in.

As a Batfleck fan, this is some of the coolest new that could have come out of Fandome. If this is what WB is leading with, I can’t wait to see the news destined to break tomorrow.

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