Netflix's Latest Stranger Things Replacement Reboots A 57-Year-Old Franchise

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Finn Wolfhard and Millie Bobby Brown in Stranger Things season 5

Published May 1, 2026, 7:30 PM EDT

Cathal Gunning has been writing about movies, television, culture, and politics online and in print since 2017. He worked as a Senior Editor in Adbusters Media Foundation from 2018-2019 and wrote for WhatCulture in early 2020. He has been a Senior Features Writer for ScreenRant since 2020.

While Stranger Things is rapidly becoming more family-friendly thanks to its spinoff, Stranger Things: Tales from ’85, Netflix’s perfect replacement for the cult hit, Scooby-Doo: Origins, can fix this with a mature reboot of an older series. While this might be dispiriting news for viewers who enjoyed the darker side of the original series, it is clear with the arrival of Stranger Things: Tales from ’85 that the Stranger Things franchise is shifting gears to become a lighter, sillier affair after the original show’s finale in December 2025.

Luckily, Netflix’s upcoming franchise reboot, Scooby-Doo: Origins, reverses this recent strategy, as the promising live-action supernatural mystery series explores the darker side of the Scooby-Doo franchise. This exciting show turns the iconic kids’ comedy into a teen drama, where Stranger Things: Tales from ’85 turned an iconic teen drama into a kids’ comedy. As a result, Scooby-Doo: Origins could be Netflix’s perfect Stranger Things replacement, now that the sci-fi show is firmly a family-friendly franchise.

Scooby-Doo: Origins Could Be A Perfect Stranger Things Replacement

Although the first images released for Scooby-Doo: Origins are charmingly goofy, the show’s behind-the-scenes pedigree proves that its tone is unlikely to be entirely playful. The co-creators of Scooby-Doo: Origins, Scott Rosenberg and Josh Applebaum, worked on Sydney Sweeney’s criminally underrated Netflix teen drama Everything Sucks and the MGM+ small-town supernatural horror series From. Thus, viewers can reasonably guess that this Scooby-Doo origin story can be afford to be a little darker and a little more teen-centric than the franchise’s existing animated shows.

Live-Action Scooby-Doo Movie

Release Year

Scooby-Doo	2002	Theatrical Release
Scooby-Doo 2: Monsters Unleashed	2004	Theatrical Release
Scooby-Doo! The Mystery Begins	2009	TV Movie
Scooby-Doo! Curse of the Lake Monster	2010	TV Movie
Velma & Daphne	2018	Straight-To-Video

This also means that, since both series are nostalgic ‘80s live-action supernatural shows starring a ragtag group of teens solving a mystery, Scooby-Doo: Origins can also be a little closer to what Stranger Things originally was than Stranger Things: Tales from ’85. Where that spinoff leaned into the kid-friendly elements of Stranger Things, Scooby-Doo: Origins can play up the teen drama between Fred, Daphne, Velma, and Shaggy, much like 2010’s sorely underrated Scooby-Doo: Mystery Incorporated.

Netflix’s Scooby-Doo Reboot Is Already A Massive Change

As the first live-action TV show in the 57-year history of the Scooby-Doo franchise, Netflix’s reboot already represents a massive change for the series. However, viewers need not necessarily see this as a bad thing. The live-action movies of the early ‘00s were met with mixed reviews when they debuted, but 2002’s Scooby-Doo and 2004’s Scooby-Doo: Monsters Unleashed are now deservedly recognized as cult classics that admirably managed the tricky task of recapturing the campy charms of the cartoon in live-action format.

Turning Scooby-Doo into a live-action show, let alone a teen drama, is a tough ask. However, Riverdale’s early seasons proved that this could be done when the show took the characters viewers knew from Archie Comics and planted them in the middle of a distinctly family-unfriendly murder mystery inspired by Twin Peaks. In the years since that series started, Chilling Adventures of Sabrina managed a similar trick, turning the fun antics of Sabrina the Teenage Witch into a moody, creepy Lovecraftian horror series.

The CW’s Nancy Drew and Hulu’s The Hardy Boys provide further proof that kid-friendly media franchises can spawn grittier re-imaginings that are more than just an extended gag. Many of these shows developed fandoms of their own and transcended their origins as edgier spins on existing PG-rated IP. Maybe the most notable example comes from another genre entirely, but the same streaming service. After all, Netflix’s Karate Kid spinoff Cobra Kai took the simplistic story of the original ‘80s sports drama and used it as the building blocks for a thematically rich, morally ambiguous exploration of toxic masculinity and redemption.

Scooby-Doo: Origins Has Some Major Hurdles To Overcome

Cheryl Blossom (Madelaine Petsch) looks to the side shocked in Riverdale

Although it would be a big ask for Scooby-Doo: Origins to recapture the acclaim that was deservedly enjoyed by Cobra Kai, Rosenberg and Applebaum’s show does have the ingredients necessary for a huge hit. The show’s incredible cast includes Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret heroine Abby Ryder Fortson, Paul Walter Hauser, and Young Sheldon’s breakout star McKenna Grace as Daphne. Furthermore, Scooby-Doo is a rare franchise that has managed to maintain a massive fandom despite plenty of misjudged earlier spinoffs and reboots.

That said, the premise of Scooby-Doo: Origins is not without its shortcomings. For one thing, the entire idea of a darker teen drama version of Scooby-Doo has already been explored by both Edgar Cantero’s novel Meddling Kids and Bill Wood’s YA book Be Right Back, meaning the premise is hardly breaking new ground. For another, the much-maligned HBOMax show Velma already re-imagined Scooby-Doo as a teen drama, complete with a love triangle between Fred, Daphne, and Velma, meaning the show will need to offer something new in this department.

The last big hurdle that the show faces is its storyline, which will reportedly focus on the Mystery Inc gang’s formation during the last day of summer camp. 2020’s Scoob! already offered viewers a prequel storyline that introduced the Scooby-Doo gang as their younger selves, with Grace even voicing the movie’s younger version of Daphne while Amanda Seyfried played her older self. As such, this plot runs the risk of feeling overly familiar.

Netflix's New Scooby-Doo Reboot Brings Back A Divisive Trend That Refuses To Die

Netflix's risky upcoming reboot Scooby-Doo: Origins offers a new take on the classic franchise, and proves one TV trend stubbornly refuses to die.

That said, it is not uncommon for a reboot to start with an origin story, and it would be weird if Rosenberg and Applebaum’s re-imagining featured the word “Origins” in the title and didn’t address them. Furthermore, many of Velma’s bigger problems came down to the show’s attempts to justify its R-rating, rather than its love triangle, so the idea of a teen romance between the main characters isn’t necessarily an inherently bad one. As such, Scooby-Doo: Origins may still prove the perfect Stranger Things replacement now that Stranger Things: Tales from ’85 has made the Netflix franchise family-friendly.