Inside The Duffer Brothers' Game of Thrones Snowball Strategy Supercharging Stranger Things

Stranger Things is heading into its final stretch with one big, obvious worry hanging over it: please don’t end like Game of Thrones. That finale still leaves a mark, and Netflix’s nearly decade-long hit has grown so huge that the landing is going to be tricky. The interesting twist? The Duffer brothers have been openly studying Thrones for years — not to copy the ending, but to learn how to scale a show as it explodes.

Borrowing the right lessons from Thrones

Matt Duffer told Variety that they used Thrones as a blueprint for building bigger every season, and they even used that as ammo when asking Netflix for more scope and budget.

"In terms of television, we always looked to Game of Thrones and what Dan Weiss and David Benioff did. They used the success to scale the show up and evolve it, and it snowballed. We would always take that example to Netflix for reasons why we should scale up the show: It’ll scale up the audience. At least, that was what we told them."

That tracks with how Stranger Things has expanded — from one small-town mystery to a sprawling, multi-location monster war. The hope is that they learned how to build up the show, not how to crash it on the finish line.

The influences behind the Upside Down

Thrones wasn’t the only compass. The Duffers pull from a very specific stew of storytellers and era touchstones, and they’re candid about it. One name might surprise you a bit if you’re thinking purely in terms of twist endings: M. Night Shyamalan.

• 80s DNA: Steven Spielberg, Stephen King, and a grab bag of 80s legends are baked into the show’s tone. You can feel it in the adventure vibes, the suburban horror, and the needle drops.
• Familiar faces from the era: The show’s also loved sliding in era icons as winks to the audience.
• M. Night Shyamalan as a career model: Matt Duffer said Shyamalan loomed large for them — not just for twists, but for risk-taking and sticking with original ideas. The Duffers had a misfire of their own before Stranger Things (their 2015 film Hidden didn’t land), and they clocked how Shyamalan rebounded from an early flop to The Sixth Sense becoming a phenomenon. Matt admitted he wasn’t consciously following that path post-Stranger Things, but the influence has been part of their creative life for a long time.

So, when do we find out if it sticks the landing?

Volume 1 of Stranger Things season 5 drops on Netflix on November 26. Between now and then, if you need a refresher on the show’s big bad, Vecna, this is your moment to cram. The stage is set, the stakes are massive, and all those lessons — from Westeros to the multiplex — are about to be put to the test.