The beginning of the end! After six years at Netflix, Stranger Things is getting ready to wrap up its journey with a fifth and final season.
Ahead of the show’s highly-anticipated season 4 premiere, creators Matt and Ross Duffer announced that they were going to end the series after one more chapter in Hawkins, Indiana.
“Seven years ago, we planned out the complete story arc for Stranger Things,” they detailed in an open letter in February 2022. “At the time, we predicted the story would last four to five seasons. It proved too large to tell in four but — as you’ll see for yourselves — we are now hurtling toward our finale. Season 4 will be the penultimate season; season 5 will be the last.”
The writing team hinted that they were planning to expand the Stranger Things universe with more projects. “There are still many more exciting stories to tell within the world of Stranger Things: new mysteries, new adventures, new unexpected heroes,” the message concluded. “But first, we hope that you stay with us as we finish this tale of a powerful girl named Eleven and her brave friends, of a broken police chief and a ferocious mom, of a small town called Hawkins and an alternate dimension known only as the Upside Down.”
Later that year, the Duffer Brothers opened up about their vision for the final episodes and addressed the season 4 episode split.
“The original plan was to release it all at once again. But as we began turning over episodes, everyone began to feel the season was too big to be released in one batch — at nearly 13 hours, it is really more two seasons than one,” they told Variety in May 2022 after Volume 1 dropped the first seven episodes. “Episode 7 is as big as any season finale we’ve ever had, so it made sense to everyone involved to split the season there. Episode 7 really serves as the end of the second act — and we feel that our final act had enough meat on the bone to make up Volume 2.”
As fans prepared for Volume 2 of season 4, Ross and Matt revealed that they were hoping the final season wouldn’t have such a long wait. “We always knew that Season 4 was going to be the penultimate season, and that its ending would dive directly into Season 5. During the six-month pandemic hiatus, we outlined Season 5 and pitched it to Netflix,” they shared at the time. “Don’t hold us to it, but the gap should be quite a bit shorter this time, due to the fact that we already have an initial outline, and we can’t imagine there will be another six-month forced hiatus.”
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Scroll down for everything to know about season 5 of Stranger Things so far: