The Stranger Things team is in Georgia (United States) filming the fifth and final season. This did not prevent Gaten Matarazzo from making an appearance during the Mega Con convention held in Orlando and confessing an opinion about the series that has brought him fame: what Ross and Matt Duffer, the creators, should do to make Stranger things were better.
“It may sound bad but we should kill more people,” he explained in statements reported by the CBR media. In his opinion, “the series would be much better if the stakes were much higher, if at any moment any of these guys could bite the dust.” So, in short, he believes that the creators are too cautious in taking care of the characters that the audience loves so much.
This, for the record, is an understandable criticism. If you look at the history of Stranger Things, the dramatic blows have always been taken by secondary or very temporary characters. Barb (Shannon Purser) served in the first to show that young characters could die. Bob (Sean Astin) died at the end of the second season, the same one in which he had joined. Billy (Dacre Montgomery) died in the third season after being an obnoxious secondary for two seasons. In the fourth, the audience was traumatized by the death of Eddie (Joseph Quinn), who was a new character.
And, if we look at the deaths that would have caused the most stir, they were always false alarms. They believed that Chief Hopper (David Harbour) had died in the finale of the third season but, as the cliffhanger already hinted, he had survived and was on Soviet soil. In the case of Max (Sadie Sink), he is in a coma that is difficult to think is definitive (because, as television fiction demonstrates time and time again, if the body is not seen and an autopsy is performed, a character can never be presumed dead).
What is clear is that, although creatively a death can help convey emotion, risk and terror to a story, actors like Gaten Matarazzo himself are not bad at continuing on the payroll. He, like Caleb McLaughlin, Noah Schnapp, Finn Wolfhard and Sadie Sink, will earn about $7 million for the final season, which translates to about $875,000 per episode.
Millie Bobby Brown, who has an overall contract with Netflix that includes her participation in other projects such as the Enola Holmes film saga, is estimated to earn significantly more per installment, as do adult actors Winona Ryder and David Harbour, who earn 9 .5 million for the fifth season, about 1.2 million per episode.
Rounding out the salaries of the main actors, Natalia Dyer, Joe Keery, Charlie Heaton and Maya Hawke will earn more than $6 million for the episodes currently in production, about $750,000 per episode. Not dying, therefore, is great for your finances.
