Frank Darabont, director of revered Stephen King adaptations The Shawshank Redemption and The Green Mile, is coming out of retirement to direct two episodes of Stranger Things season 5 – and it's for an impossibly wholesome reason.
"What really dragged me out of retirement was that my wife and I really love this show," Darabont told The Daily Beast. "Our content now is so filled with horrible people doing horrible things for greedy reasons but Stranger Things has so much heart. That positivity is something I really responded to."
The Shawshank Redemption, starring Tim Robbins and Morgan Freeman, hit theaters in 1994 and was nominated for seven Academy Awards. It was eventually preserved in the National Film Registration by the Library of Congress. Darabont went on to direct two more Stephen King adaptations, The Green Mile and The Mist. Unlike Shawshank, The Green Mile was a commercial success – earning $286.8 million against a budget of $60 million. Darabont's last project was the neo-noir crime drama Mob City, starring Jon Bernthal, which was canceled after one season. The filmmaker retired shortly after.
Stranger Things season 5 marks the show's fifth and final season after first hitting Netflix in 2016. The series is one of, if not the biggest show on the streaming platform, and each episode of the last season is being shot like its own hour-plus-long movie.
