Spoiler Warning: Major spoilers from the last season of Stranger Things are featured throughout this article, so please proceed at your own risk.
It feels like it’s been so many years, but Stranger Things Season 5 is officially coming back, and on the 2025 TV premiere schedule.
After three years of waiting after the epic finale of Season 4, we are getting the series ending that we’ve all been dreaming of and hoping for. Here is what we know so far.
What Is The The Stranger Things Season 5 Premiere Date?
It’s official – we finally have a release schedule for Stranger Things Season 5. Here is how it’s going to go down, according to Netflix Tudum:
- November 26th: The first four episodes.
- December 25th: The next three episodes.
- December 31st: The finale.
We're focused on visual effects sequences right now. We started back in January, so it's going well. We're actually ahead of schedule which is rare for us, so that's great…it's coming this year.
I know, I know – I’m sure a part of us are all tired of this type of release schedule, but hey, it’s the last time we’re ever going to get this show and it makes us even more excited for the holidays. We even have a teaser for it – check it out below:
The Stranger Things Season 5 Cast
The cast for Stranger Things Season 5 is as follows:
- Winona Ryder (Joyce Byers)
- David Harbour (Jim Hopper)
- Millie Bobby Brown (Eleven)
- Finn Wolfhard (Mike Wheeler)
- Gaten Matarazzo (Dustin Henderson)
- Caleb McLaughlin (Lucas Sinclair)
- Noah Schnapp (Will Byers)
- Sadie Sink (Max Mayfield)
- Natalia Dyer (Nancy Wheeler)
- Charlie Heaton (Jonathan Byers)
- Joe Keery (Steve Harrington)
- Maya Hawke (Robin Buckley)
- Priah Ferguson (Erica Sinclair)
- Brett Gelman (Murray)
- Jamie Campbell Bower (Vecna)
- Cara Buono (Karen Wheeler)
- Amybeth McNulty (Vickie)
- Nell Fisher (Holly Wheeler)
- Jake Connelly (Derek Turnbow)
- Alex Breaux (Lt. Akers)
We also know from Netflix that new cast member, Linda Hamilton, will play someone named Dr. Kay. Who that is in the grand scheme of the show, I’m not sure, but we’ll find out soon enough.
What Stranger Things Season 5 Will Be About
Praise Vecna (but not seriously, though), because we FINALLY have more details about the Stranger Things Season 5 story, thanks to that Tudum article above. Here is what Season 5 will be about.
When “the fall of 1987” happens, there are rifts that open in Hawkins, and the characters we all know and love are united to try to find and kill Vecna, but he vanishes without a trace. The military places Hawkins in quarantine and continues to hunt down Eleven, but as the anniversary of Will’s disappearance looms closer, a certain darkness returns and a battle is brewing, one that is going to require everyone to stand together in an epic fight.
So now I’m just even more excited and need November to come right now.
Season 5 Will Only Take Place In Hawkins
Don’t expect to go anywhere new this time around. It’s been reported that Season 5 will only take place in Hawkins, as reported by Matt Duffer in an appearance on the Happy Sad Confused Podcast in July 2022, where he confirmed the plan was for Season 5 be set back where we’re familiar:
That’s what we anticipate and hope to do, which is to just to keep it contained in Hawkins. It’s going to feel a lot larger in scale than Season 1. We want to go back to a lot of things we did in Season 1 and a lot of the original groupings and pairings we had in Season 1.
Considering the premise, I’m fine with that – let’s finish this off where it all started.
There Will Be A Lot Of “Action Sequences” in Season 5
We know that Season 5 will be pedal to the metal right from the very beginning. In an interview with Us Magazine in October 2024, Finn Wolfhard teased that Season 5 would be filled with “action sequences” unlike most other seasons, and that it’s a very “intimate season, but at the same time, a huge season, just in the scale of it.”
Honestly, that kind of lines up with what everyone has been saying. Even Sadie Sink had a cryptic response to what her character would be doing in Season 5 during an interview with Variety in August 2024, saying:
They love having me run. That’s all I’ll say.
I just need to know more.
We Know The Episode Titles For Season 5
During Stranger Things Day, Netflix revealed the titles for the upcoming season, which are below:
- The Crawl
- The Vanishing of [Redacted]
- The Turnbow Trap
- Sorcerer
- Shock Jock
- Escape From Camazotz
- The Bridge
- The Rightside Up
Um, I’m sorry, who is vanishing? Is “Sorcerer” about Will because he was always the sorcerer in the D and D group? I’m so interested.
Stranger Things Season 5 Episodes Won’t Be As Long As Season 4
Although each episode featured in Stranger Things Season 4 was over an hour long (and the finale clocked in a little under two-and-a-half hours), it doesn't sound like we should expect to see too many chapters running all that long when the show’s fifth season premieres at some point in the future.
During a July 2022 appearance on the Happy Sad Confused Podcast , co-creator Matt Duffer explained that the reason the Season 4 episodes were so long was because there was so much character set-up required, a level of exposition that really won’t be all that necessary in Season 5.
Even so, if the episodes aren’t going to be long, they are going to feel packed and like “movies” – Maya Hawke said in an interview on Podcrushed in December 2024 that the eight episodes are “very intense and serious” and does comment that the episodes are long:
“We’re making, basically, eight movies. The episodes are very long. 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.”
It makes me wonder how long these episodes really are going to be. To be honest, that makes me confused because they said at the presentation for Next on Netflix in January 2025 (via TechRadar) that they shot over “650 hours of footage” for Season 5. How is that going to make shorter episodes? Goodness gracious.
With a set premiere date now for the show, it feels like it’s going to be here before we know it and we’ll have to say goodbye to Hawkins forever. But at least, in the meantime, there are some great shows to binge on Netflix that will hold you over until it comes out – and then we’ll need to find a new sci-fi obsession. I’m already sad thinking about it.
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