How the Duffer Brothers’ only movie ended in disaster: “We had studio heads yelling at us”
Before creating a phenomenon with Stranger Things, the Duffer Brothers had a chaotic experience making their debut film for Warner Bros.
It’s been evident within the past two decades that television has begun to replace film as the preferred medium for telling mature, complex stories for engaged audiences. The type of thought-provoking, character-driven films that would have contended for awards in a different generation now exist on television in the form of Succession or Severance, as theatres are mostly seen as a platform to release works of spectacle.
The dominance of television has grown even stronger now that many “blockbuster titles” with massive budgets, intense worldbuilding, and passionate fandoms have become television shows, and Stranger Things is chief among them.
Much of the credit behind Stranger Things is owed to Matt and Ross Duffer, whose creative means of worldbuilding have helped the series reach record-breaking viewership numbers for Netflix. Although the release of a new Stranger Things season is met with the same anticipation as a summer movie, the Duffers admitted to being “a little delusional” when making their first film a decade prior.
According to an interview conducted by The LAist, the Duffers wrote the script for the psychological thriller The Hidden while they were in college, and later sold it to Warner Bros.
“It sold in this dream scenario for someone recently out of college,” Ross said. “There was a bidding war between studios, and it felt like we suddenly went from being unemployed to being in Entourage or something. It felt like this amazing dream come true.”
The Hidden takes place in the aftermath of an apocalyptic outbreak that has devastated the United States, and stars Alexander Skarsgård and Andrea Riseborough as parents who travel with their daughter (Emily Alyn Lind) to find safety. As exciting as it was for two 26-year-olds to land a gig making a studio film, Matt said that having “studio executives yelling” at them all the time became a stressful experience, which his brother agreed with.
“It was unbelievable to us at the time, and then that ended up going from a dream experience to crashing and burning,” Ross said. “We didn’t know what the hell else we were going to do with our lives; this is all we knew how to do. We felt like we’d been preparing to do this since we were little kids.”
Although The Hidden was actually met with positive reviews, it was barely released, leading Matt to describe him and his brother as being “a little delusional,” as they “had no other skills”. Ross may have joked they were concerned that they “couldn’t even get a job at Starbucks”, but it was only a year later that Stranger Things became a breakout hit.
Even though Stranger Things has been seen as the ultimate example of the type of monocultural event that television could become, the Duffers have turned their interest to the big screen, as they recently signed a deal with Paramount Pictures to make films with guaranteed theatrical windows, something they couldn’t have achieved at Netflix. Hopefully, their next production will not suffer the same pressures and anxieties that occurred while making The Hidden.
