Back in June of 2023, it was announced that Prey director Dan Trachtenberg would be directing an episode of the fifth and final season of the hit Netflix series Stranger Things. A few months later, Trachtenberg told Collider, “I was prepping (the episode) before the strike and doing previews for sequences and stuff. It’s awesome! I’m doing it because I love that show so much. I think every season has gotten better and better and better, and this is the final one, and the Duffers are geniuses and good, really good dudes. And this episode, that’s just ‘an episode’ of Season 5, has several awesome set pieces in it and it’s gonna be huge, man. It’s a big season, and, so far, so cool. … Me and the Duffers have very similar sensibilities, raised around the same time and on the same movies, and this is genre stuff that I haven’t totally gotten to play in yet and I don’t know if I would, so, I’m glad I can just grab on. I want to ride, too!“ The season started filming in January of 2024 – and even though it was announced in February of 2024 that Trachtenberg would be making Predator: Badlands, we thought he had managed to squeeze in his Stranger Things episode before the Predator movie stared filming at the end of August ’24. But, during a recent interview with ScreenTime, Trachtenberg revealed that wasn’t the case. He did not get to contribute to Stranger Things season 5.
Trachtenberg said, “I was actually supposed to do an episode of Stranger Things, the third episode, and we had started work on it and then (Predator: Badlands) got greenlit. So it was (the animated Predator movie) Killer of Killers and this. It was a chance where maybe I could squeeze that in and then go off to New Zealand and do this, but with the two (Predator) things happening at the same time, I could not, so I had to bow out.“
We recently learned that the third episode of Stranger Things season 5 is called The Turnbow Trap and has a running time of one hour and six minutes. That’s the episode Trachtenberg was supposed to direct until he got too busy with Predator projects.
Stranger Things creators the Duffer Brothers were understanding about Trachtenberg having to drop out of their show, and they even have computerized voice cameos in Predator: Badlands.
The first four episodes, that’s volume one, of Stranger Things‘ final season will debut on November 26. Volume two (consisting of three episodes) will follow on Christmas Day, and the series finale will drop on New Year’s Eve. Predator: Badlands is heading for a November 7th theatrical release. JoBlo’s own Chris Bumbray gave the film a 7/10 review that can be read at THIS LINK.
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