Netflix confirms when ‘Stranger Things’ Season 3 will finally be premiered

Netflix has finally announced when Season 3 of Stranger Things will air—and it won’t align with Halloween this time.

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The highly anticipated third season will arrive summer 2019, which was previously teased with the commercial for Hawkins’ Starcourt Mall that said it was coming “next summer.” Watch the teaser below.

The confirmation was made at the Television Critics Association’s summer press tour on Sunday in Beverly Hills.

“It’s a handcrafted show,” Netflix’s vice president of original content Cindy Holland says. “The Duffer brothers and Shawn Levy have worked really hard, and they understand the stakes are high. They want to deliver something bigger and better than what they did last year. And so they really want to take the time to get it right.”

In addition to the confirmation, Holland says Season 3 of Stranger Things will contain “more special effects” than previous seasons.

The third “much darker” season began production in April. There’s not much we know about what the season entails, but three new characters will be added into the mix. The characters include an “alternative girl,” Cary Elwes playing the Hawkins mayor, a “handsome, slick and sleazy” ’80s politician and Jake Busey playing a local journalist with “questionable morals.”

Not only that, but our favorite dad Steve Harrington (Joe Keery) will have a bigger role in Season 3.

“We’ll definitely get to see some more of Steve Harrington in Season 3, and I’ll just say we won’t be abandoning the Dad Steve magic. I don’t want to say much more, but I literally feel that we were walking along and we stumbled onto a gold mine with Dad Steve,” producer and director Shawn Levy says.

Even though we have to wait a bit longer for the third season, at least fans are getting both a book series, a video game and a comic-book series based on Stranger Things to hold them over in the meantime.