When season 4 of Netflix’s “Stranger Things” ended in 2022 with the ominous cliffhanger of black smoke billowing out of gaping rifts slicing through the fictional town of Hawkins, fans everywhere sighed in dismay. Almost four years would pass before they got their burning ‘what happens next?’ questions answered.
Around the 2025 release of season 5, fans flocked to social media to criticize the extensive period of time it took to release the final season. Their disappointment lay particularly with the fact the series took over 10 years to film only five seasons, during which the actors of the series much outgrew their roles as middle and high school students.
“Stranger Things” is not alone. It seems, at least to viewers, that many series and movies are receiving these kinds of complaints. But what exactly happens during the production of your most beloved TV show, or the highest anticipated movie of the year? Why does it take so long?
In the early stages of development, films or television seasons begin with writing a script. When a screenplay is completed, producers review the scripts and identify marketing logistics.
“[The producer] has to break the script down into: ‘is this script marketable? Is this script hitting certain demographics?’” said David Ivy, an Los Angeles-based filmmaker, composer and graduate of the University of Southern California School of Cinematic Arts.
After making any necessary tweaks to the original script based on those assessments, the process moves to pre-production.
“[Pre-production] is when the director starts getting their hands dirty, and they start working with department heads to figure out the looks of things,” said Ivy.
This is often the point where casting occurs and where the shot list, the detailed document that specifies every single camera shot for the film or show, is created. In-depth planning for how the filmmakers are going to execute each shot of the project and what is needed to make that happen is this stage’s major purpose.
From there, the project moves to production, where the media is actively being filmed. Complicated cast and crew schedules, location availability and other constraints make filming schedules complicated and long-lasting. At this point, hundreds of individuals with unique on-set responsibilities work in tandem to create the film or show.
Post-production comes after the filming has been completed. It’s at this stage where editing takes the project from the assembly cut to the final theatrical cut.
“The assembly cut is where they literally just assemble all of the footage into some semblance of the film. This is often where most filmmakers look at the movie and start crying, because most of the time the movie looks and feels so terrible. Everybody feels like they failed,” said Ivy. “But for anybody that’s been through it enough times, this is how it’s supposed to feel. The first draft is always terrible.”
When the project becomes “picture-locked,” the point when the visual edit is finalized, audio and visual effect editing, composition and test screening with audiences take place. Promotion and eventual release of the media to theaters or streaming services happens when the project is complete.
Those steps can make the process take multiple years. With added pressures like money, time, or unprecedented disruptive events like writer’s strikes or even a global pandemic, producing these projects in a short period of time is no easy feat.
So do these series or movies deserve criticism for their long development periods? Especially if that extended time means more care and attention being devoted to creating authentic art? Ivy does not think so. To him, in order to create genuine television or film, it is imperative that production teams are allowed plenty of time to fully flesh out the intricacies of their storytelling.
“The filmmakers that you love to watch, the Spielbergs, the Gerwigs, the Camerons, they’re spending millions of dollars and years of their life to to create these [movies,]” said Ivy. “I feel like if people really understood how much effort these filmmakers are putting into making content, maybe they’d be a little more respectful.”
Maybe it seems like it is taking longer for anticipated movies and TV shows to hit theaters and streaming services worldwide, but then again, maybe nothing has changed except our attention spans. Ivy notes that popular films that utilize elements of suspense or take their time with exposition might lose their potency because of social media.
“Tiktok is training us to have the attention span of a goldfish. … If the content doesn’t grab you within three seconds, do you not swipe?” said Ivy. “If ‘Raiders of the Lost Ark’ were a TikTok video, nobody would watch it. They would just swipe.”
And with new tactics like Netflix’s “second screen strategy,” the plot and dialogue quality of movies and television are being sacrificed for mass consumption.
“[Netflix] actually asks their writers to write the story in such a way that everything is more or less expositionally told three times, so that while you’re on your phone you don’t miss what’s going on,” said Ivy.
While film and television have a vast history of being an art form — meant to inspire, teach, challenge norms and cast a mirror on human nature — rapid production of media and an even more rapid consumption of it makes this medium more about entertainment and content value than artistry or meaningful storytelling.
“As long as we’re training ourselves to treat all media like content, and when true, profound media shows up, it’s going to be harder to recognize that it’s there to help us, to want to talk to us, to heal us, because we’re just not going to be ready for it,” said Ivy. “[Filmmakers] aren’t just making films so that you can be on your phone and not watch. … [Filmmakers] out there making movies are literally spending years of their lives to make sure that when you see [their work], you’re going to feel something, [so that] every frame is a painting to you.”
