Netflix bestowed a New Year's gift to all
Stranger Things fans last night: the release date of the show's third season.
Stranger Things 3 will debut on July 4, 2019.
Just before 2018 ended, Netflix
tweeted out another trailer for
Stranger Things 3 (the above video is a shortened version from Netflix's YouTube channel). The nearly four-minute-long clip takes viewers back to New Years' Eve 1985, specifically Dick Clark's iconic New Year's Rockin' Eve broadcast. Mysterious interferences interrupt the broadcast, sending static onto the screen along with strange messages like "when blue and yellow meet in the west."
We also learn that the Starcourt Mall advertisement from a previous
teaser trailer is a commercial that ran during Dick Clark's broadcast—at least in the Hawkins, Indiana area.
Just after the ball drops and the fireworks go off, the tagline "one summer can change everything" appears. It's followed by the date July 4, 1985, confirming the rumors that
Stranger Things 3 will take place, at least in part, during the summer of 1985. The past two seasons have followed Mike, Eleven, and the others during preceding falls and winters, so the new summer timeline will be a change of pace.
Netflix followed up by tweeting a
poster for
Stranger Things 3 right after it debuted the release date trailer. The poster shows Dustin, Max, and Lucas ogling at fireworks in the sky, while Mike stares at Eleven, who is distracted by something ominous and out of frame. And whatever Eleven sees, Will sees it, too.
The third season's release date has been highly anticipated for a while now. At the end of last year, Netflix announced a new
Stranger Things game that will folllow the events of season three, and it released the
titles of the next season's eight episodes in a separate teaser trailer. But with that hype, no release date came. Now, all
Stranger Things fans can start their countdowns and plan to celebrate the Independence Day holiday in Hawkins—it will likely be a crazy one.