Recent statements and official episode runtimes from Stranger Things co-creator Ross Duffer confirm that rumors about the final season’s episode lengths were indeed exaggerated.
While Season 4 featured exceptionally long episodes, the new season will revert to more standard runtimes, except for the series finale.
Ross Duffer, who co-created the Netflix phenomenon with his brother Matt Duffer, posted the lengths of the first four episodes of the final season on his Instagram Monday.
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The Season 5 premiere, “The Crawl,” is 1 hour and 8 minutes;
Episode 2 (whose full title hasn’t been disclosed) runs 54 minutes;
Episode 3, “The Turnbow Trap,” runs 1 hour and 6 minutes; and
Episode 4, “Sorcerer,” runs 1 hour and 23 minutes.
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After running almost entirely at or under an hour per episode since the show premiered in 2016, “Stranger Things” Season 4 expanded significantly: all but one episode ran over 70 minutes, and the final three episodes were all feature length, with the finale clocking in at two hours and 22 minutes.
Netflix is breaking up the fifth season of the show into three discrete releases: The first four episodes will premiere on Nov. 26, over the Thanksgiving holiday, with “Sorcerer” serving as a mid-season finale.
The next three episodes will premiere on Christmas, and the finale, “The Rightside Up,” will premiere on New Year’s Eve. Along with the Duffer Brothers, the episodes were directed by executive producer Shawn Levy and filmmaker Frank Darabont (“The Shawshank Redemption”).
The full cast is returning for the final season, including Winona Ryder, David Harbour, Millie Bobby Brown, Finn Wolfhard, Gaten Matarazzo, Caleb McLaughlin, Noah Schnapp, Sadie Sink, Natalia Dyer, Charlie Heaton, Joe Keery, and Maya Hawke.
