Muristek
Return of the blockbuster series arrives at a precarious time for the streamer and all eyes are on how many viewers click play
Way back in 2016, when Stranger Things first hit Netflix, the world was a different place. The streaming service itself cost $8, and if you weren’t turned on by the prospect of endless, if vastly quality-variable content, there was the small matter of Stranger Things to convince you to hit that subscribe button. It had 80s nostalgia in spades, a soundtrack better than most John Hughes movies, and somehow seemed to do Stephen King better than the writer himself – or at least those film-makers and showrunners who have tried to bring the horror maestro’s work to the screen.
Flash forward six years and Stranger Thing returns following a three-year break (presumably disrupted by Covid). Now Netflix is no longer the streaming revolution’s bright young thing, but a creaking behemoth that costs up to three times as much as it used to, especially if you’re viewing in UHD, and has 6 million competitors. It’s lost 200,000 subscribers and is predicted to lose 2 million more. Stock valuation has fallen more than 25% and there’s even talk of an advert-fuelled cheaper version of the service, something Netflix said it would never do.
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