There may still be a considerable wait until we get to see season four of Netflix hit series Stranger Things back on screens next year, but as well as multiple hints from the cast that season five is pretty much guaranteed to follow, Netflix's co-CEO Ted Sarandos has suggested that we are seeing the "birth of a franchise" with new spin-offs coming in the future. Being one of Netflix's biggest draws, with season three pulling in 582 million viewing hours in its first 28 days, it was always likely that the streamer would look to expand beyond the flagship show and we may be finally about to see that happening.

In an almost contradictory comment, Sarandos told the audience at the Code Conference in Beverly Hills, "Franchises are good, but what you want are hits." He however continued, when talking about Stranger Things specifically, to say that the show is currently "a franchise being born" and also hinted that there were "spin-offs" being considering. Of course Millie Bobby Brown has a deal with Netflix, which will see her not only return as Eleven in Stranger Things but also reprising the title character in Enola Holmes, so there is every likelihood that she would be on board for a Stranger Things spin-off centered on main character Eleven with the Duffer Brothers. There are also a few options already out there that could be explored in future branches of the sci-fi horror series.

The world of Stranger Things expanded into a series of prequel novels around the time of season two's premiere on Netflix, and has included stories about the previous horrors of the experiment that let to the creation of Eleven and the revelation of the Upside Down, and a novel about Jim Hopper's past, working as a detective in New York. Both of these things have been hinted at in the series so far, and according to star David Harbour there will be more of Hopper's past in the new season.

Speaking to Collider about his role in the upcoming season, Harbour said, "I can talk about Hopper. I guess I say this about a lot of seasons, but it's my favorite season, in the sense that he's at his purest, he's at his most vulnerable, in a sense. He's been, as we've seen, he's in this Russian prison, so we get to reinvent him in a sense. He gets to have a rebirth from what he had become, and we'd always sort of planned this almost resurrection of you have Gandalf dies, Galdalf the Grey re-emerge, and I'm really interested in this resurgence of him. We get to explore a lot of threads in his life that have merely been hinted at that we get to see a lot more of. And there's some real surprises that you know nothing about that will start to come out in this and play big as the series goes on."

Whether these surprises could lead to a Jim Hopper spin-off series, who knows, but there are plenty of fans of Harbour's character, and indeed many of the characters in the show, who are invested enough to want to know more about the Stranger Things family, and the creatures of the Upside Down, than will be told in the coming season. Netflix recently put out the new trailer for Stranger Things season four, which introduced the Creel Family home, which is owned by the character played by horror legend Robert Englund in the series. This news originated at Deadline.