After waiting well over three years, Stranger Things Season 5 is only a week away from premiering on the 2025 TV schedule. Still, considering what a monumental effort it’s been to make each season of the science fiction/horror series, it’s rather fitting that we’ve had to wait the same amount of time as often passes between two blockbusters from the same film series. Stranger Things episodes are also quite lengthy, although while setting the record straight on the runtimes for the Netflix subscription-exclusive show’s final episodes, creators Matt and Ross Duffer had a disagreement about where the “movie-length” rumors started.
Stranger Things Season 5’s release is being broken into three parts, with the first four episodes coming out on November 26, the next three following on December 25, and the series finale releasing on December 31. The Duffer Brothers were asked during an interview with Collider how long the last four episodes would be, which resulted in the following exchange:
- Matt: I mean, episode four is on the longer side, an hour 20. I think the only episode that breaks an hour and a half is the final episode, which is two hours.
- Ross: A little over two hours.
- Matt: I don't know exactly how they got out that every episode was gonna be a movie, but --
- Ross: I think we said it.
- Matt: No. Let's dig up that evidence, I don't think I said it.
- Ross: I think we may have said, we did not say it was movie length, we said like a movie.
- Matt: The season is like a mega movie.
We learned how long the first four episodes of Stranger Things Season 5 would be last month, and while Chapter Four does indeed clock in at 83 minutes, the other three will respectively be 68 minutes, 54 minutes and 66 minutes. While the runtimes for Chapters 5-7 remain a mystery, they won’t surpass the series finale’s two-hour length, which is 30 minutes less than the Season 4 finale. Like I said, Stranger Things is quite the time commitment, but only the finale is going to actually be movie-length.
Evidently there was a miscommunication between The Duffer Brothers and certain Stranger Things fans when Ross said earlier this year Season 5 is like “eight blockbuster movies.” To be fair, they did clarify what they meant by that statement not long after, in that the episodes will feel like they’re movie-quality. So for anyone who didn’t receive that memo, Matt Duffer is hopeful you won’t be disappointed by these shorter-than-presumed runtimes, saying:
Anyway, I hope people aren't -- I don't know whether some people are gonna be disappointed that they're shorter than they expected, and some people are gonna be relieved that it's not like 30 hours that they have to watch.
Matt Duffer then added that it would have been too overwhelming to make every episode of Stranger Things Season 5 two hours or more. Or as he specifically put it:
If they were two hours each, I would not be here, I'd be dead.
Well we don’t want that! Judging by the Stranger Things Season 5 previews, these eight episode certainly look like they’ll make the final showdown with Vecna and the forces of the Upside Down a cinematic-quality event. To tweak an old saying, runtime is just a number, so fans needn’t worry about this final chapter not getting the attention it deserved.
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