One of the coolest things about the third season of “Stranger Things” is that it recreates the 1980s mall experience, bringing to life the fictional Starcourt Mall and packing it with real shops from the past like Sam Goody and Waldenbooks. The Starcourt is a central location in the third season, where the characters hang out and eventually battle the season’s big bad.
To bring the period-authentic mall to life here in the present day, the team over at Netflix transformed the real-life Gwinnett Place Mall in Duluth, GA into the Starcourt Mall!
The real mall, it’s fun to note, opened in 1984 – one year before the Starcourt’s arrival in the show’s faux timeline!
As explained by fan website StarcourtMall.com…
“The Gwinnett Place Mall is a large, dying two level mall with the majority of the store fronts vacant. Because of this the production crew for Stranger Things obviously saw an opportunity to bring their vision of an 1980’s mall to life here. They took both levels of a large wing of the mall including the completely vacant food court and turned it into a fully recreated 1980’s style mall.”
The site continues, “Around March 2018, the set designers for Stranger Things came in and began the daunting task of completely transforming this large wing of the mall into a recreated and functional 1980’s looking mall. By the second week of May 2018, the transformation was complete and filming began on the show.”
In other words, yes, the Starcourt Mall is kinda-sorta a real mall than you can visit, though the ’80s aesthetic and retro stores have been removed. It’s now, once again, the plain old Gwinnett Place Mall, which will likely be getting an influx of new shoppers in the coming weeks and months. Now that it’s a pop culture icon, perhaps business will even boom like it did in the ’80s.
Check out some before/after images below, and see more over on StarcourtMall.com.
You can also learn more about the real mall with the below video.
