Stranger Things Season 5 Is Making A Significant Change From Season 4
The Duffer Brothers say that Stranger Things season 5 will have a major difference and it might actually relieve some fans.
Now that Netflix has dropped the final two episodes of Stranger Things season 4 (crashing their own platform in the process), fans of the hit horror-fantasy series only have one thing to look forward to: season 5. The penultimate, especially bloody season of Stranger Things has set up a pretty huge upcoming climax for the series, but the Duffer Brothers are willing to admit one thing that is coming. According to Deadline, Stranger Things season 5 will not be full of the gargantuan, movie-length episodes that typified season 4.
However, Matt Duffer did say that the finale of Stranger Things season 5 (and the series as a whole) would be feature film-length. It is certainly appropriate that a series that has built up as much mythology and drama as this one would need a whole lot of runtime to actually wrap things up, but at a certain point, some episodes just need to be watchable in a single sitting. Matt Duffer did also go on to say that Stranger Things season 5 would pick up essentially directly where season 4 left off. Whether he means that it will begin exactly where we left Eleven (Millie Bobby Brown) and the whole gang, or whether there would just be a short gap of time is unknown.
Matt Duffer did also describe the Stranger Things season 5 finale as being similar to The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King, in that there would be “like, eight endings.” The extended ending of the final installment of the Lord of the Rings trilogy was pretty widely criticized for its interminable ending (regardless of how faithful it was to the source material), which makes that kind of a weird statement to amp people up for the finale of Stranger Things. On the other hand, the Duffer Brothers are probably pretty confident that audiences will be coming back in droves to see what finally happens to all our juvenile heroes and also Steve, regardless of how drawn out that last episode is.
Stranger Things season 5 will be the culmination of one of the biggest series ever for Netflix, which is both benefiting them through massive viewer numbers and shutting the door on their prize pig. Netflix has been in quite a bit of trouble recently, with declining subscriber numbers and heavier and heavier competition from the likes of Disney+ and HBO Max steadily eating into their once unquestioned dominance. The executives at Big Red have to be breathing a sigh of relief that they are getting a Squid Game season 2, at least for now.
There is not yet a release date for Stranger Things season 5, but the sure money is no earlier than 2024. But it sounds like this last season will mostly be a little bit quicker of a watch for fans, even if there are increasingly gruesome and horrible things happening to characters we have come to care about. But if you are tuning into Stranger Things season 5 for any other reason than that, you probably have the wrong show.
