What Do We Know About Stranger Things‘s upcoming fifth and final season, or simply Stranger Things 5 (as Netflix is calling it). More than you may think. The Netflix series was an instant hit when it debuted in 2016 and has since become a pop culture mainstay. After the two-part fourth season set the stakes for the series’s end, fans have been waiting for years to see how it all ends. Let’s dive in and look at what is coming from The Duffer Brothers for the end of their iconic streaming series.
Thanks to COVID-19. The Duffer Brothers began planning the fifth season of Stranger Things before they started the extended production of the fourth season, marking the first time in the series that they wrote this far in advance. The Duffers did go back and adjust their outline based on feedback on the fourth season, including changing the series’ final episodes. The Duffers have confirmed that the majority of the outline for the final season remained unchanged. Still, we will probably have to wait until after the final run debuts to learn what was actually adjusted.
The final season will comprise eight episodes, the same as the first and third seasons and one less than the second and fourth. While the fourth season split the release of the nine episodes by reserving the final two chapters for a month after the first seven, the fifth season is going to be split into three “volumes,” giving us a big build-up to what is expected to be one of the most-watched series finales of all time.
The writing staff of the final season have described the ending of Stranger Things as “if seasons 1 and 4 had a baby” and that the narrative feels like it was “injected with steroids”. Fan response to the fourth season has been exceptionally positive. Still, with the characters split between multiple locations across the fourth season and only coming together in the final episodes, audiences hope this season will keep the cast together as they confront Vecna and his minions from the Upside Down as they invade our world.
The main cast is all set to reprise their roles, including Winona Ryder, David Harbour, Finn Wolfhard, Millie Bobby Brown, Gaten Matarazzo, Caleb McLaughlin, Noah Schnapp, Sadie Sink, Natalia Dyer, Charlie Heaton, Joe Keery, Maya Hawke, Priah Ferguson, Brett Gelman, and Cara Buono. Jamie Campbell Bower is set to return as the evil Vecna, while Amybeth McNulty has been upped to a regular after playing Vickie in the fourth season. The biggest new addition to the cast we know of is Linda Hamilton, who is joining in an undisclosed role. Nell Fisher (Evil Dead Rise), newcomer Jake Connelly, and Alex Breaux (Joe Pickett) have also joined the cast.
A casting call was sent out for the role of Hopper’s late daughter Sara. The series was searching for a child actress that closely resembles Elle Graham, who played Sara in season 1.
Harbour told ComicBook.com, “Getting back to the OG crew of this final season has been wild in a way because we have come so far and it is not the show that we started in Season 1. I think that’s a wild experience for all of us. I mean, those kids were 11 years old when we started, 12 years old. Now they’re 20 and they’re shaving and they aren’t kids anymore. Finn (Wolfhard) just directed a movie. I think to have it all come back full circle… We just did a read-through of the last episode and the amount of crying… like the episode is very beautiful. But there’s also a deeper level of that, this was actually their childhood. They were 11 years old and grew up and fought this monster. And I’ve never seen so much heavy, heavy weeping from teenagers or young adults in my life. There was some cameras there, but we didn’t do it for the publicists or the Instagram people. There was something intimate about the way they structured it that I’m hoping that you don’t see very much of that, because there was something profound in the sense that we are a family. There is the deeper level, it is about us as individuals who’ve worked together for nine years since they were kids, and that really came through. There was a real deep kind of honesty and heartbreak and bittersweet quality to all of it.“
Harbour told Happy Sad Confused host Josh Horowitz that he has very strong opinions about the show that may not match the opinions of a fan. Since he works on the show and sees “the nuts and bolts,” he’ll get very mad at what he thinks is a bad episode or if there’s a season he didn’t like. He said (with thanks to People for the transcription), “I can be very critical of this show,” but with the series finale, “They land the plane, and it is the best episode they’ve ever done. The end of this episode when we were reading it – just us reading it – about halfway through, people started crying. Then about the last 20 minutes, it was just uncontrollably crying, waves of different people. Noah Schnapp being my favorite. I think part of that also is the fact that these kids, it was their childhood. Like, they started the show when they were 11 and 12, and here we are reading [the finale]. It’s 10 years later, and we examine that idea, and it’s so well done and so beautiful. It’s such a great episode, and it’s such a great season. You guys will love it.“
When asked how his Stranger Things character Mike Wheeler is doing, Wolfhard told The Hollywood Reporter, “He is well! He’s good. This last season is sort of a crossroads, and so we’re getting back into a lot of the dynamics of season one, which is really fun. There’s some ‘leader Mike’ moments, and it’s a very grand season, obviously. Every season has gotten bigger and bigger and bigger, and this season is huge, but it’s also kind of isolated as well. So it’s really fun, and I’m very excited for people to see it. … Not being around everyone all the time was definitely a bummer about filming 4, but 5 is the opposite. We’re all together all the time, and a bunch of us live around the corner and across the street from each other in real life. So the cast is really seeing each other a lot, and we’re in a lot of the same scenes, which has been really great. … We’re about three months in, and it’s really crazy. You think about how to be as present as possible, but then at the same time, you’re conflicted that this is the last one. So I’m trying to find that balance of staying present while also knowing that this is going to be the last season. But it’s been great.“
Wolfhard was also asked if he was frustrated by the fact that Stranger Things season 4 was delayed by the pandemic, then season 5 was delayed by the strikes. He said, “I’m definitely not frustrated. It is what it is. You spend so much time on a show that it’s all-encompassing, and it’s something that means so much to me. It’s the thing that made my career, and it really shaped my life. So as far as the show not coming out yet, the only frustrating part is wanting to see it and having to wait. I just want people to see it and I want to be able to see it. But the rest of it? No. I’m indebted to Stranger Things, and it’ll take however long it’s going to take. There’s no way to control that, so you might as well just ride it.“
Wolfhard told Us Weekly that while working on season 5, “[I’m] really trying to be present with the character. I’ve just been very deliberate in the way that I treat coming onto set, just having as good of a time as we can since we know it’s the last season.” He couldn’t reveal much about the episodes, but he did say there’s “a lot of action sequences,” while also describing season 5 as “a really intimate season, but at the same time, a huge season, just in the scale of it.“
During an interview on iHeart’s I’ve Never Said This Before with Tommy DiDario, Bower said (with thanks to The Hollywood Reporter for the transcription), “If you thought last season was nuts, this season is just out of control, wild, like it’s bonkers. It really, really is. It’s bigger. It’s just completely insane. It’s completely insane.” The season is so big, with so much going on, that Bower even admitted that he’s struggling to keep track of all the events.
Maya Hawke, who joined the show in season 3 to play Robin Buckley, told Podcrushed that each of the eight episodes is so long, it’s like they’re making eight movies. Hawke said (with thanks to Deadline for the transcription), “Our showrunners, Matt and Ross (Duffer), take a lot of responsibility. They have an amazing team of writers, but they’re very involved. They write a lot and they are very intense and serious about the quality of the continued writing, and it takes a long time to write each season, and it takes a long time to shoot them. We’re making, basically, eight movies. The episodes are very long.“ Stranger Things season 4 also had long episodes, with the shortest of the bunch being 63 minutes and the season finale clocking in at 150 minutes.
Speaking to Variety, Wolfhard said the last day of filming Stranger Things season 5 was “incredibly emotional, obviously. It’s the last 10 years of my life. Also for the creators, the Duffer Bros. started when they were 30 and now they are 40. Everyone had a long journey and shared it together. My whole childhood was there. It was sort of the Toy Story 3 moment of leaving your toys behind. It was really special. We had a long last year. We shot sort of ‘Lord of the Rings’ style with a year-long shoot. It was a great way to go out and very intense. I feel like it couldn’t have ended better.“
Ross Duffer told Entertainment Weekly, “We spent a full year filming this season. By the end, we had captured over 650 hours of footage. So, needless to say, this is our biggest and most ambitious season yet. It’s like eight blockbuster movies. It’s pretty, pretty insane.” Matt said, “At the same [time], we think it’s — or hope it’s — our most personal story. It was super intense and emotional to film. … Season 5 will be big and epic. There’s no time for a ramp-up. It’s going to be intense from beginning to end.” Ross continued, “It’s also going to feel familiar. This season is the biggest it’s ever been in scale, but everyone’s back together in Hawkins, interacting the same way they were in season 1.“
Asked if working on Stranger Things season 5 felt like working on a movie, due to the high production value and very long episodes, Linda Hamilton told Coming Soon, “Well, because it was a very long haul. We took a year to shoot eight episodes, so I’ve never been on a project for a year. Six months is the biggest. Terminator, Dante’s Peak, things like that used to be six-month shoots, and hardly anybody does that anymore. But to carry on for a year, and because scheduling was huge and it changed all the time just because the production and weather and this and that. So it was being in a state of readiness to race to Atlanta for an entire year at any given moment. So that was really interesting. Like ready to pounce, to just nail the character in the way that she deserved. They started with all my big scenes, my first week in. I mean, I was there getting ready before that, but my first week of shooting was like huge. I looked at what they were on the schedule, and I was like, ‘No way are we doing that. I haven’t even spoken words from the character yet.’ They don’t start with Episode 1. We’re heavy into Episode 2, and then I realized that every single day they shoot, it’s that huge. Do you know what I mean? I was like, well, ‘This has to be a partial ’cause there’s no way they’re going for this entire stunts, special effects, big acting, lots of character stuff.’ And that’s my first day, because every day that they shoot, they have big scenes like that.“
The Duffers Brothers will direct multiple episodes, with the premiere episode already credited to them. I imagine they will also helm the series finale. We also know that Shawn Levy and Dan Trachtenberg will direct at least one episode each, and Frank Darabont has returned to directing after an 11 year break to direct an episode. “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.”
With production underway since January 2024, we know very little about the finals season. The Duffers have unveiled tidbits here and there, but the only concrete details we know are that the first episode of the season is titled “The Crawl” and that the script opening lines of the first scene read “The sound of COLD WIND, GROANING TREES. And… A CHILD’S VOICE. Singing a familiar song!”. The Duffers wrote a twenty-five-page mythology back during Season One to explain to Netflix executives what was happening in the Upside Down, and they state these final episodes will answer any lingering questions as yet unanswered. The Duffers have also stated that Will will be a substantial part of the final season as he comes into his own.
We’ll let the official synopsis cover this one: A year after the events of the fourth season, in the fall of 1987, the group seeks to find and kill Vecna after the Rifts opened in Hawkins. The mission becomes complicated when the military arrives in Hawkins and begins hunting Eleven. As the anniversary of Will Byers’ disappearance approaches, the group must fight one last time against a deadly threat.
The Duffer Bros have shared a handful of images from behind the scenes, including a shot of Jonathan (Charlie Heaton) and Nancy (Natalia Dyer) looking worried while sitting in the backseat of Steve Harrington’s (Joe Keery) car. Check them out:
Want to know the title of every episode? Here’s the list:
Here’s a featurette:
And the official teaser:
With the stage play The First Shadow a hit in London and a secret spin-off in development since 2022, the end of the main stories of Stranger Things is certainly not the end of the franchise. It seems very likely that the main characters will be retired from the focus of any shows or films that come next, but Netflix will be mining this IP for animated projects, novels, games, and, yes, more series for years to come.
Stranger Things 5 is slated to premiere in 2025, three years after the fourth season. The longest previous gap between seasons was the three years between three and four caused by COVID.
Netflix announced that Stranger Things season 5 will be released in three parts, with volume one on November 26, 2025, volume two on Christmas Day, 2025, and the series finale on New Year’s Eve.
Stay tuned to JoBlo.com as we learn more about the final season of Stranger Things and all your other favorite shows. What do you expect to see in the upcoming Stranger Things 5? Let us know in the comments and click the like and subscribe to follow all our latest original videos.