Eleven May Look Significantly Older When 'Stranger Things' Season 3 Rolls Around

Stranger Things 2 dropped on Netflix this past Halloween weekend and by the time actual Halloween arrived, most people had already polished off the nine-episode second installment. Fans are clamoring for information about the next exciting chapter and now that we have two seasons under our belts, we can start to forecast what to expect from the Duffer Brothers. The first and second seasons premiered 15 months apart, so we can assume Season 3 (which has already been picked up) will air sometime in early 2019. So how old will Millie Bobby Brown be in Stranger Things Season 3? The show is using time jumps wisely.

Brown is currently 13 years old and will celebrate her 14th birthday in February. So she'll be around that age when they start filming again. This lines up perfectly with the Duffer Brothers' plans for Season 3's timing. You may have noticed that Stranger Things 2 took place during election season 1984 — exactly one year after Stranger Things Season 1 ended. That's in part to account for the actual aging of the series' child actors. And the show's creators have confirmed that they plan to continue using time jumps in this manner for the planned four seasons (and possibly a fifth) of Stranger Things. Perhaps the most exciting part of this is that it'll carry the five core kids' stories into high school, which offers endless opportunities for great storytelling.

Will, Mike, Lucas, and Dustin were in 8th grade during Stranger Things 2, which means that Season 3 will feature their daunting transitions to high school. Plus, it's going to be the end of Hopper's one-year lockdown of Eleven, which may mean that she'll get to go to school with her friends. And while I'm sure the boys will be super protective of her, it's probably not going to be the fun-loving bro-down we see when it's just Will, Mike, Lucas, and Dustin. They definitely all care about each other a lot, but with Mike and Eleven's romantic spark, the dynamic of five best buds nerding out together kind of gets lost. It'll be interesting to see if Eleven can break into the complex world of finding friends who are girls, which offers another opportunity for more great child actors to join the cast (and, let's be honest, another opportunity for us to get super attached to characters only for them to die).

Meanwhile, the show's stars are beginning to catch the eyes of film directors, which means that everyone is splintering off into their own projects. Getting the cast together for the filming of Season 3 might be a bigger challenge than ever. Brown landed a role in Godzilla: King of Monsters, the sequel to 2014's Godzilla and the 33rd film in the franchise. It's easy to see what a huge opportunity it is for her just by taking a look at her co-stars in the film: Kyle Chandler, Vera Farmiga, and Thomas Middleditch. Finn Wolfhard, who plays Mike, also had a role in this year's well-received It reboot, and David Harbour will play the titular superhero in next year's Hellboy.

Nailing down everyone's schedule may slow down production on the subsequent seasons of Stranger Things, but it definitely doesn't feel like the Duffer Brothers are running low on material. Stranger Things 2 matched all the atmospheric intrigue of Season 1 and it still took big risks with its divergent Chicago episode, which sparked healthy critical debate on the internet. The series doesn't show any signs of losing its luster in upcoming seasons, even if the wait feels like torture.

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