Stranger Things gets a 1950s prequel — and even its title, Other Worlds, comes from Stephen King

Netflix made it official this week: Other Worlds: A Stranger Things Adventure, a live-action prequel series, premieres in 2028. The teaser's title card sets it in Marion, Nevada, on April 19, 1955 — 28 years before the flagship series, in a different town, with a boom box playing "Sh-Boom" before the sky tears open into what looks like another version of the Upside Down. Kate Trefry, a longtime Stranger Things writer who also wrote the stage play, co-created it with the Duffer Brothers and will run the show.

Stranger Things has never hidden that it grew in Stephen King's garden — small town, kids on bikes, a monster under the surface, a title font lifted from his paperbacks. What's new is which part of King it's borrowing. HBO built IT: Welcome to Derry by rewinding the clock on a King property decade by decade; Netflix is now running the same play on the King homage itself: a prequel set in the mid-century past, built to excavate the mythology's origins. Even the title reads like a King lift — "there are other worlds than these" is the Dark Tower's most famous line, and naming your multiverse prequel Other Worlds is not a coincidence a writers' room fails to notice.

HBO's Derry prequel rewinds 27 years at a time. Netflix's Stranger Things prequel rewinds 28.

The corner the Duffers wrote themselves into

The skepticism under the announcement practically wrote itself, and the top comment went straight at the model:

"Stranger Things is so heavily inspired by IT that Netflix is going to copy the Welcome to Derry model too. I don't want to be cynical about this but it's hard not to be."

But the sharper observation in the thread was structural, not cynical: the flagship series spent its last seasons retrofitting every mystery onto Vecna, collapsing the show's open weirdness into one villain's biography. A story whose ending exists and whose every thread feeds one character leaves no room to move forward — the only unexplored territory is backward. The 1950s setting isn't just an aesthetic choice; it's the sole direction the mythology left available.

There's a corporate echo, too. The Duffers themselves decamped to Paramount, staying on Netflix projects as the franchise's godparents — so Netflix's biggest homegrown hit is now being extended the way studios extend licensed IP: new towns, new decades, the creators consulting from a competitor's lot.

Don't miss: Who exactly is nostalgic for 1955? Netflix's Stranger Things prequel is about to find out

For fans, the fork is simple. Done well, this is their Welcome to Derry — a genuinely scary period piece that rebuilds mystery the mothership spent. Done safely, it's Vecna: The Early Years with a doo-wop needle drop.

Previously we wrote: Stranger Things Day: still no secret ninth episode — Netflix answered the theory with a prequel instead