It's official: Stranger Things won't return to Netflix this year

Netflix just dropped a trailer showing off a lot of what's coming in 2024. There's some good stuff in there, including new seasons of Cobra Kai and The Umbrella Academy, new shows like 3 Body Problem and Avatar: The Last Airbender, the second part of Zack Snyder's Rebel Moon and a fantasy movie called Damsel starring Millie Bobby Brown, and the returns of heavy hitters like Bridgerton and Squid Game. Watch below:

So that's the good news. But if we look at this from a glass-half-empty perspective, there are a lot of big shows not included in the preview, including huge hits like Wednesday, Stranger Things and the new anime-to-live-action smash One Piece. We won't be seeing any new episodes of those this year.

One Piece isn't that surprising, since the first season aired just last year and it's become de riguer to have to wait at least two years for new seasons of big, splashy, special effects-driven shows like that. Wednesday, a hugely successful riff on The Addams Family, is a little more frustrating, since the first season of that show aired towards the end of 2022. According to Deadline, filming on season 2 begins in April in Ireland.

As for Stranger Things, the fourth season aired in the middle of 2022. Filming on the fifth and final season just began. Given how long that takes and the intensity of the post-production process on this show, it's not a surprise to hear that it won't be back until 2025, but it is frustrating. Thanks to the pandemic, fans had to endure a three-year wait between seasons 3 and 4. Now, thanks to delays caused by the actors and writers strikes last year, they'll have to endure a similar wait for season 5.

First looks at The Umbrella Academy season 4 and Squid Game season 2

But let's flip back to being positive for a second. 2024 will feature the final bow for The Umbrella Academy, Netflix's little superhero series that could. The trailer above features the beleaguered Hargreeves siblings taking "one last shot, for old times sake," assumedly right before they leave to stop another apocalypse they're partially responsible for causing.

And then there's the return of Squid Game, the Korean drama about desperate people willing to risk their lives in a sick game for the chance of winning a huge cash prize. The first season of Squid Game is the most successful show in the history of Netflix, so its return is a big deal. In the brief clip in the trailer, we see hero Seong Gi-hun (Lee Jung-jae), still sporting the electric pink hair he got at the end of the first season, determined to hunt down the people behind the Squid Games and put an end to their scheme. Good luck with that.

There are other things on the way, including the final season of Sweet Tooth, a new season of Outer Banks, a sci-fi thriller starring Jennifer Lopez called Atlas, and more. All in all, it should be a pretty interesting 2024 on Netflix. I'll try and go into February with a glass-half full outlook.

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