Following the most-talked-about fourth season finale of Stranger Things, series creators Matt and Ross Duffer have addressed this season’s lengthy episodes which include a two-and-a-half-hour-long final episode.
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During a recent interview at Josh Horowitz’s Happy Sad Confused podcast, the Duffer Brothers confirmed that they don’t expect the final season to feature the same runtimes as its predecessor, revealing that Season 5 will have faster pacing in terms of its narrative. This is because, unlike Season 4, it won’t include its usual story introductions.
“The only reason we don’t expect to be as long is because typically — or this season, if you look at it, it’s almost a two-hour ramp up before our kids really get drawn into a supernatural mystery,” Matt Duffer explained. “You get to know them, you get to see them in their lives, they’re struggling with adapting to high school and so forth. Steve’s trying to find a date, all of that. None of that is obviously going to be occurring in the first two episodes. For the first time ever, we don’t wrap things up at the end of four. 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.”
However, its series finale episode will definitely be “a lot longer,” teasing that it would probably be “going to be Return of the King-ish with, like, eight endings.”
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The series currently stars Winona Ryder, David Harbour, Millie Bobby Brown, Finn Wolfhard, Noah Schnapp, Gaten Matarazzo, Caleb McLaughlin, Natalia Dyer, Joe Keery, Charlie Heaton, Sadie Sink, Maya Hawke, Priah Ferguson, Cara Buono, and Brett Gelman. Season 4 also introduced a number of new actors including Nightmare on Elm Street star Robert Englund, Jamie Campbell Bower, Eduardo Franco, Joseph Quinn, Sherman Augustus, Mason Dye, Nikola Djuricko, Tom Wlaschiha, Myles Truitt, Regina Ting Chen, Grace Van Dien, and Amybeth McNulty.
Stranger Things is created and executive produced by Matt and Ross Duffer, who also serve as showrunners. Executive producers are Shawn Levy, Dan Cohen, and Iain Patterson.
All episodes of Season 4 are now available for streaming exclusively on Netflix.
