‘Stranger Things’ Teens To Get Massive Pay Increase For Season 3

Stranger Things will have a much bigger payroll for Season 3. The stars of the hit Netflix sci-fi drama, most of them young teens, have scored major pay raises for the upcoming third season of the show.

Stranger Things stars Millie Bobby Brown (Eleven), Finn Wolfhard (Mike), Gaten Matarazzo (Dustin), Noah Schnapp (Will), Caleb McLaughlin (Lucas), Winona Ryder (Joyce), and David Harbour (Hopper) are reportedly all finalizing deals that will include major pay bumps, according to Deadline. The site reports that the young stars of the series will get a pay increase that could be as high as $200,000 to $250,000 more per episode, with breakout star Millie Bobby Brown possibly getting a larger increase than her peers. The teen stars reportedly earned about $30,000 per episode for the first two seasons of Stranger Things.

Adult Stranger Things stars Winona Ryder and David Harbour could earn as much as 350,000 per episode, while series regulars Natalia Dyer and Charlie Heaton will make somewhere in the $100,000 to $150,000 range, Deadline reports. Netflix has not confirmed the Stranger Things cast’s salaries, but the young teens are major TV stars now due to the massive success of the show.

In addition to the established cast, there will also be some new faces on Stranger Things 3. Maya Hawke will join the cast as a series regular, playing an “alternative girl” named Robin. Priah Ferguson, who played Lucas’ younger sister Erica in several memorable scenes in Stranger Things 2, has been upped to recurring guest status, according to TV Line.

Production for the third season of Stranger Things is expected to begin soon. Showrunners Ross and Matt Duffer have said they “have made peace with the fact” that they can’t stop the teen stars from growing up, so they are making the most of their maturing cast.

“We are leaning into it,” Matt Duffer told Indie Wire. “I love the fact that they’re going through adolescence.”

In addition, the Duffer brothers said the third season of Stranger Things will focus more on character development than the past two seasons of the series.

“It’s not necessarily going to be bigger in scale,” Matt Duffer said. “What I am really excited about is giving these characters an interesting journey to go on.”

Because time can’t stop with these growing young stars, the third season of Stranger Things is set to jump ahead a year, landing the characters in the year 1985. In an interview with Vulture, Stranger Things creators Matt and Ross Duffer talked about the Netflix series and dropped a clue that Stranger Things could end before the teen stars get out of high school.

“We’re thinking it will be a four-season thing and then out,” Ross Duffer told Vulture. “We just have to keep adjusting the story.”

You can see a clip from the second season of Stranger Things below.

The eight-episode Stranger Things 3 is expected to hit Netflix sometime in 2019.