Now that the penultimate season of Stranger Things has concluded, series creators Matt and Ross Duffer, better known as the Duffer Brothers, shared plans for Stranger Things 5.
Warning: Post contains spoilers from Stranger Things Season 4 Volume 2.
The Duffer Brothers shared that the forthcoming fifth and final season’s finale will not be as long as Stranger Things 4 finale, which had a runtime of 2 hours and 22 minutes. According to the brothers during an interview with Josh Horowitz’s Happy Sad Confused podcast, the Stranger Things 5 series finale still has a runtime of “at least two hours.”
“The only reason we don’t expect it to be as long is because if you look at it, it’s almost a two-hour ramp-up before our kids really get drawn into the supernatural mystery,” Matt said. “You get to know them, you get to see them in their lives, what they’re struggling with, adapting to high school, and so forth. Steve’s trying to find a date, all of that. None of that obviously is going to be occurring in the first two episodes of [Season 5].”
Stranger Things 5 Will Hit The Ground Running
“For the first time ever,” Matt continued, “we don’t wrap things up at the end of [Season] 4, so it’s going to be moving. I don’t know that it’s going to be going 100 miles an hour at the start of 5, but it’s going to be moving pretty fast. 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.”
The Duffer Brothers joked about the Stranger Things 5 finale being “Return of the King-ish.” They were referencing the third film in the Lord of the Rings trilogy. That film’s runtime is 3 hours and 21 minutes. They joked about the series finale having “like, eight endings.” The Duffers did confirm that season 5 will be set entirely in Hawkins with the group staying together as opposed to season 4.
“We wanna go back to a lot of the things we did in Season 1,” Matt said. “A lot of the original groupings and pairings that we had in Season 1 – there’s something nice about coming full circle.”
The Stranger Things Creators Know How The Series Will End
The Duffer Brothers did share that they know how Stranger Things 5 will end but getting there is still mostly unknown. “It’s dangerous as a writer to be writing hours and hours and not know where you’re going,” Ross said. “I’d rather leave some of that middle journey vague and fuzzy.”
“But so long as you know where that destination is, it sort of gives you that clarity. It’s like that lighthouse blinking in the distance … while a lot of Season 5 is actually pretty blurry, the last 30 minutes of it are pretty clear in our heads. So if we can make the journey entertaining, I think that we have an end that will hopefully satisfy. You can’t satisfy everyone, but the hope is that it’s something that feels right for this story.”
Unfortunately for the Eddie Munson (Joseph Quinn) fans, the brothers confirmed the fan-favorite character is definitely dead but they did tease that his death will have “huge repercussions” with the survivors. As for Max (Sadie Sink), she is alive but “brain dead, blind, and all of her bones are broken,” the brothers said.
Sink recently told Entertainment Weekly that filming Max’s near-death scene with Vecna (Jamie Campbell Bower) was very emotional. “It really is just so sad,” Sink said. “When you’re putting yourself in that moment and then you’re with someone like Caleb [McLaughlin], who I’ve known since I was very little, sometimes things can feel very real on that set. It was very emotional.”
No details on when filming will start or a release date for Stranger Things 5.
