Stranger Things 5: Final Season Is Like "8 Movies" With "Very Long" Episodes

Stranger Things season 5 will have "very long" episodes, according to star Maya Hawke.

By Cameron Bonomolo

Some television shows conclude with a feature-length movie, but Netflix's Stranger Things is ending with eight mini-movies. Series creators Matt and Ross Duffer already revealed that the fifth and final season will span eight episodes, and that the Stranger Things series finale will run "at least two hours" when it finally arrives on Netflix in 2025. (While still feature-length, that's shorter than the season 4 volume 2's "mega-episode" finale, which clocked in at a super-sized two-and-a-half hours.) After the previous installment's two-part, nine-episode, 13-hour season, just how big is Stranger Things season 5?

According to Maya Hawke, who plays Robin, so big that the final season is going to take an entire year to shoot. "We're making, basically, eight movies," Hawke said on the Podcrushed podcast, adding that the final season's episodes are "very long." 

"Season 4 and season 5 are very connected," she explained. "Season 4 had a part I and part II because they separated them, so the last two episodes came out at a different time, which is unusual for streaming. But this is its own season. It is a continuation, but it's the finale. And it has been a long time since last season."

In the two years since season 4 — which paused production in March 2020 due to the pandemic — Stranger Things 5  weathered the 2023 writers' strike and the actors' strike before filming got underway in January 2024. ("The show has been a little bit cursed," Hawke joked of the delays.)

"Our showrunners, Matt and Ross, take a lot of responsibility. They have an amazing team of writers, but they're very involved," she added. "They write a lot and they are very intense and serious about the quality of the continued writing, and so it takes a long time to write each season, and a long time to shoot them."

As for the shortened episode count — season 5 will consist of eight episodes, down from season 4's nine episodes — that's because the final season will hit the ground running. Stranger Things 5 picks up where season 4 volume 2 left off: with the Upside Down turning Hawkins, well, upside down.

"The only reason we don't expect it to be as long is because if you look at it, it's almost a two-hour ramp-up before our kids really get drawn into the supernatural mystery," Matt told the Happy Sad Confused podcast in 2022. "You get to know them, you get to see them in their lives, what they're struggling with, adapting to high school, and so forth. Steve's trying to find a date, all of that. None of that obviously is going to be occurring in the first two episodes of [season 5]."

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He continued: "For the first time ever, we don't wrap things up at the end of [season] 4, so it's going to be moving. I don't know that it's going to be going 100 miles an hour at the start of [season] 5, but it's going to be moving pretty fast. Characters are already going to be in action. They're already going to have a goal and a drive, and I think that's going to carve out at least a couple hours and make this season feel really different."

Stranger Things season 5 — starring Winona Ryder, David Harbour, Millie Bobby Brown, Finn Wolfhard, Gaten Matarazzo, Caleb McLaughlin, Sadie Sink, Noah Schnapp, Joe Keery, Maya Hawke, Charlie Heaton, Natalia Dyer, Jamie Campbell Bower, and Linda Hamilton — is expected to release on Netflix in 2025.

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