‘Clearly as ambitious and well crafted as any movie’: Netflix’s biggest series continues its staunch refusal to embrace the fact it’s a TV show

While undeniably cinematic in nature given the vast budget, exhaustive visual effects, and immense scope, Stranger Things is still a TV series at the end of the day, but executive producer and occasional director Shawn Levy – for whatever reason – can’t seem to wrap his head around it.

Of course, he’s not the first or only filmmaker to claim that despite featuring a single story arc spread across multiple episodes that’s regularly split into distinctive blocks known as “seasons,” what’s being put on the screen is actually a segmented feature film smuggled onto screens in separate installments.

Ironically, creators the Duffer Brothers have only directed one movie and that was a lo-fi thriller released almost a decade ago, but Levy once again insisted the big screen is the most sensible place for Stranger Things in an appearance on the Happy Sad Confused podcast.

“For many years now I’ve been dying, just as an audience member which is, at the end of the day I’m still a guy sitting in the audience who wants to be delighted. Even when I’m directing I’m thinking about what it would feel like if you’re watching it, and that kind of is my roadmap.

I would love to see, I mean honestly, I would love to see a whole screening series of Stranger Things in theaters, because the brothers are just magnificently cinematic filmmakers and the work that they’re doing is clearly as ambitious and well crafted as any movie, and I would love to see us go out with the biggest bang possible. If the theatrical experience can be part of that, that would make me personally super happy.”

Based on how high the hype levels will be by the time it actually gets around to releasing, Stranger Things 5 is more than likely to screen in multiplexes in one form or another. However, no doubt much to Levy’s dismay, that still doesn’t make it cinema.