“Stranger Things” Season 4 Volume 2 Trailer Teases Feature-Length Final Episodes

Netflix has just revealed the full trailer for Stranger Things season 4, volume 2, which will deliver a two-part season finale to what has been a chilling, thrilling ride.

In the final episode of the first part of season 4, “The Massacre at Hawkins Lab,” it was revealed that Vecna, the new big bad haunting Hawkins, was actually once a patient of Dr. Martin Brenner (Matthew Modine), much like Eleven (Millie Bobbie Brown),

By The Credits  |  June 21, 2022
Marvel Developing “Wonder Man” Series With “Shang-Chi” Director Destin Daniel Cretton

Talk about a great pairing. Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings director Destin Daniel Cretton is teaming with Brooklyn Nine-Nine and Community writer Andrew Guest to create a Wonder Man series for Marvel. Guest will be the head writer of the series, while Cretton will executive produce and possibly direct one or more episodes. While Guest is primarily known for his comedy chops (30 Rock and Marry Me are also on his C.V.),

By The Credits  |  June 17, 2022
HBO Developing Jon Snow-Centered “Game of Thrones” Sequel

Surprise! Or perhaps it’s not that much of a surprise given the number of Game of Thrones prequels that have been in development, or at least in discussion, at HBO. However, a Game of Thrones sequel focused squarely on the life of Jon Snow? Yeah, that’s big news.

The Hollywood Reporter has the scoop that HBO is in the early stages of development on a spin-off series that would focus on Kit Harington’s Jon Snow after the events depicted in Game of Thrones. 

By The Credits  |  June 17, 2022
“Westworld” Season 4 Trailer Reveals the Return of HBO’s Ambitious Sci-Fi Epic

Have you questioned the nature of your reality lately? If you haven’t, HBO can nudge you towards the existential end of things with the first trailer for Westworld‘s season 4. The ambitious sci-fi series returns after a two-year hiatus, with the robot hosts of the titular theme park now on the loose in the real world—and doing their level best to reorder the hierarchy between themselves and humans. Westworld has been consistently one of the best-looking productions on TV,

By The Credits  |  June 16, 2022

Interview

Sound Designer

How the “Stranger Things” Sound Team Creeps You Out

When Millie Bobby Brown’s Eleven experiences a flashback a couple of hours into Stranger Things‘ fourth season, sound effects tell the mutant teenager’s nightmarish origins story in a nutshell: thunder, whooshing, whistles, choral voices, more thunder, pistol shots, birds screeching, rumbling, slithering sounds, squishes and thumps flood her head with 50 seconds worth of precision-orchestrated mayhem. In Matt and Ross Duffer’s supernatural thriller, sound effects, melded with Kyle Dixon and Michael Stein‘s throbbing synthesizer music,

By Hugh Hart  |  June 16, 2022

Interview

Production Designer

“Maid” & “Under the Banner of Heaven” Production Designer Renee Read on Building Trust

Production designer Renee Read is responsible for the look of two of TV’s most successful adaptations over the past two years. For Maid, Read was tasked with helping showrunner Molly Metzler Smith and the rest of the crew adapt author Stephanie Land’s 2019 best-selling memoir “Maid: Hard Work, Low Pay, and a Mother’s Will to Survive.” The series is centered on Alex (Margaret Qualley), a young woman relying on the Byzantine social services complex to get her and her daughter on their feet.

By Bryan Abrams  |  June 16, 2022

Interview

Composer

“Succession” Composer Nicholas Britell Goes Behind Season 3’s Score

Rarely has awful behavior been accompanied by such beautiful music, but the fictitious scoundrels of Succession have now spent three seasons buoyed by brooding scores from pianist-composer Nicholas Britell. A three-time Oscar nominee, Britell honed his skills at Juilliard and Harvard before becoming the go-to composer for directors Adam McKay (Don’t Look Up), Barry Jenkins (Moonlight, If Beale Street Could Talk), and Steve McQueen (12 Years a Slave).

By Hugh Hart  |  June 15, 2022

Interview

Cinematographer

“Barry” Cinematographer Carl Herse on Lighting Season 3’s Dark Path

Barry cinematographer Carl Herse has his fingerprints all of season three in what is turning out to be a reckoning for the titular hitman (played by co-creator/writer/director Bill Hader). Herse joined the Barry team and lensed five of season three’s 8 episodes (1, 2, 6, 7, and 8) in what has turned out to be the darkest stretch of Barry’s decidedly pitch black journey thus far.

Citing influences as wide-ranging as Akira Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood,

By Bryan Abrams  |  June 14, 2022

Interview

Producer, Special/Visual Effects

Breaking Down the Astonishing Technology Behind Ava DuVernay’s “One Perfect Shot”

The cathedral wedding in John M. Chu’s Crazy Rich Asians. Diana Prince boldly crossing a World War I battlefield in Patty Jenkins’ Wonder Woman. Lisa stuck on a zip-line suspended above a raucous crowd in downtown New Orleans, in Malcolm D. Lee’s Girls’ Trip. Cathartic, lovely, or almost distressingly hilarious, these scenes are indelible. What did their directors do to make them tick?

In One Perfect Shot,

By Susannah Edelbaum  |  June 14, 2022
Netflix Reveals “Squid Game” Season 2 Teaser While Creator Reveals Clues

Netflix revealed a brief but beguiling new teaser for Squid Game and a letter from creator Hwang Dong-hyuk, who teases some season two character reveals. These are the kind of actual details we’ve been waiting for.

You’re well aware by now that Squid Game‘s first season was an international sensation, so there’s been a lot of interest, and speculation, about what Hwang Dong-hyuk would do for season two.

By The Credits  |  June 13, 2022
First “The Last Of Us” Image Reveals Peek at HBO’s Hugely Ambitious New Series

We’ve got our first image from HBO’s hotly-anticipated upcoming series The Last Of Uswith the show’s two leads, Pedro Pascal (The Mandalorian) as Joel and Bella Ramsey (Game of Thrones) as Ellie, looking haunted but resilient as they try to get to safety. The image was revealed during Thursday’s Summer Game Fest (the series is based on Naughty Dog’s PlayStation game of the name),

By The Credits  |  June 10, 2022

Interview

Director

“Ozark” Director Amanda Marsalis on Ruth, Wendy, and Bittersweet Goodbyes

When Ozark came to its bloody, sin-soaked end this year, you might have found yourself, Marty Byrd (Jason Bateman) style, sitting there quietly for a moment to do some accounting. The Byrd family had, against all odds, survived the chaos they’d been plunged into four seasons back when Marty’s business partner in Chicago made the mistake of cheating the wrong client. That put Marty in a life-or-death situation that would carry on for over a year—make matters right by laundering money for a powerful Mexican cartel,

By Bryan Abrams  |  June 9, 2022

Interview

Cinematographer

“Stranger Things” Cinematographer Caleb Heymann on Season 4’s Monstrous Mayhem

*Spoilers below for the first seven episodes of season 4!

The first seven episodes — the last two are expected in July — of Stranger Things Season 4 go big. Hopper (David Harbour) is alive but in a Soviet prison. The kids are split up, with Eleven (Millie Bobby Brown) and Will (Noah Schnapp) living the opposite of a teenage dream out in California. The rest of the gang are still in Hawkins,

By Susannah Edelbaum  |  June 7, 2022

Interview

Casting Director

“Stranger Things” Casting Director Carmen Cuba on Finding Season 4’s New Faces

*There are spoilers for season 4 below, so proceed with caution if you’re not caught up!

With every new season of Stranger Things comes a new crop of teens to replace those ill-fated in prior seasons to the predations of the Upside Down that lurks under Hawkins. In addition, in  Season 4, the show’s beloved original members are scattered across the globe, leaving room for new cast members to take on feature roles in Hawkins’ latest rescue.

By Susannah Edelbaum  |  June 6, 2022
“The Boys” Season 3 Arrives on Amazon With Hype to Spare

In one narrative thread of season two of Amazon’s gleefully unhinged superhero sendup The Boys, Homelander (Antony Starr) pursued a very messy relationship with Stormfront (Aya Cash). Their budding romance became problematic when Stormfront was revealed to be a full-blown Nazi, a public relations nightmare for the slightly more subtly sadistic Homelander, and it ended, as many relationships do in this show, in an abundance of gore.

Season three has now arrived,

By The Credits  |  June 3, 2022
“The Staircase” Writer/Director Antonio Campos’s Dazzling Twist on True Crime

Writer/director Antonio Campos (The Devil All The Time) first began thinking about adapting the iconic docu-series The Staircase back in 2008. As a young, up-and-coming filmmaker, Campos imagined adapting the French series, centered on the sensational trial of American novelist Michael Peterson, accused of killing his wife Kathleen, in 2001, into a feature film. In fact, the French doc itself was meant to be a feature, but after director Jean-Xavier de Lestrade and producer Denis Poncet embedded with the Peterson family,

By Bryan Abrams  |  June 2, 2022

Interview

Production Designer

“Severance” Production Designer Jeremy Hindle’s Dystopian Office Space

“Large room, four desks.” That’s the only description production designer Jeremy Hindle had to work with when he came up with this TV season’s most spookily immaculate office, as seen in Apple TV + series Severance. The high-concept sci-fi thriller, partially directed and executive produced by Ben Stiller from a script by first-timer Dan Ericson, centers on the tyrannical Lumon Industries corporation whose employees (played by Adam Scott, John Turturro, Britt Lower,

By Hugh Hart  |  June 2, 2022
Ewan McGregor, “Star Wars” & “Star Trek” Family Defend “Obi-Wan Kenobi” Star Moses Ingram

You might recall back in 2017 when Star Wars: The Last Jedi premiered and some Star Wars “fans” began bullying Kelly Marie Train, one of the film’s stars, often using horrific language. “I won’t be marginalized by online harassment,” Tran wrote shortly thereafter, in an essay for The New York Times. “It wasn’t their words, it’s that I started to believe them.

By Bryan Abrams  |  June 1, 2022

Interview

Actor, Director

Bill Hader on Bringing Up “Barry”

For eight seasons, Bill Hader gained a legion of fans with the hilarious characters he brought to life on Saturday Night Live. Since then, his popularity has only grown with his Emmy-winning portrayal of the manic hitman/aspiring actor in the HBO series Barry. But to hear Hader tell it, performing wasn’t his initial goal. For as long as he can remember, he wanted to direct.

“Since I was fairly young…I would say 10 or 11 was when I first started to notice the ‘directed-by’ name,” Hader says during a recent Zoom interview.

By Chris Koseluk  |  June 1, 2022
“Stranger Things” Season 4 Smashes Netflix Record With 287 Million Hours Viewed

Sorry, Bridgerton season 2, but Stranger Things just turned Netflix’s record books upside down. The fourth season of the Duffer Brothers’ beloved series has smashed the record for the best premiere for an English-language series, with viewers notching 286.79 million hours of viewing time from May 25 to 27. Bridgerton was the previous record-holder for an English-language series with a healthy 193 million hours over its premiere weekend this past March.

By The Credits  |  June 1, 2022