Budget Showdown: Stranger Things Season 5 vs Avengers: Endgame — Who Spent More?
Netflix is going supernova on Stranger Things Season 5, reportedly spending $400–$480 million on the eight-episode final run — eclipsing Avengers: Endgame’s $356 million budget by more than $100 million and vaulting the series into the ranks of the most expensive TV ever.
Stranger Things is going out like a blockbuster — and it is priced like one too. Netflix has poured a jaw-dropping amount of money into the fifth and final season, and the numbers are, frankly, kind of wild.
The price tag, in plain English
Industry newsletter Puck says Season 5 landed in the $400 million to $480 million range for just eight episodes. That pushes it past Avengers: Endgame, which Box Office Mojo lists at $356 million, by more than $100 million. For a TV season. Let that sink in.
On a per-episode basis, you are looking at $50 million to $60 million each — roughly $850,000 for every minute of screen time. For comparison, Season 4 cost around $30 million per episode and totaled about $270 million across nine episodes. So Season 5 is almost double per episode while having one fewer episode.
If you are tracking the biggest-spenders list, The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power is the other show in this neighborhood at about $58 million per episode for its first season. Either way, we are firmly in 'feature film every hour' territory.
This is a massive leap from where the series started. The first season cost around $48 million total in 2016. That is roughly a 900% jump by the finale — the kind of escalation you only see when a show becomes a global juggernaut and tries to stick the landing with eight mini-movies.
How the budget ballooned: season-by-season snapshot
- Season 1 (2016): About $6 million per episode; $48 million total across 8 episodes
- Season 2 (2017): About $8 million per episode; $72 million total across 9 episodes
- Season 3 (2019): About $10 million per episode; $80 million total across 8 episodes
- Season 4 (2022): About $30 million per episode; $270 million total across 9 episodes
- Season 5 (2025): About $50–60 million per episode; $400–480 million total across 8 episodes
Where all that money is going
A big chunk is simply people. On high-end shows, labor tends to eat 50% to 60% of the budget. Production — sets, gear, stages, locations — often takes another 15% to 25%. Post-production (editing, sound, music, color, all the nerdy finishing work) makes up the rest. That breakdown tracks with what the Duffers are clearly doing: making each episode feel theatrical.
This is the first time Stranger Things has teamed up with Industrial Light & Magic, the Star Wars and Marvel mainstay. The scope is what you would expect when you bring in ILM: a full-on invasion of Hawkins from the Upside Down, giant rift sequences cracking the town open, heavy particle simulations for those creeping dark-matter clouds, and digital doubles to pull off stunts and bigger action beats. There is de-aging for flashbacks, photoreal creature hybrids, and meticulous compositing to stitch together the real world and the Upside Down in ways that do not look like TV shortcuts.
Production also built out large-scale sets to sell an apocalyptic Hawkins under military lockdown. Multiple houses are on the VFX job beyond ILM — SCANable VFX among them — because a show this big never runs through just one pipeline. The Duffers reportedly shot more than 650 hours of footage during principal photography, which is a monstrous amount of material to wrangle in post, and that work stretches deep into 2025.
The paydays
Cast salaries are tiered and, yes, they are hefty now. Per Puck's 2023 reporting:
Tier 1: Winona Ryder and David Harbour are each at about $9.5 million for Season 5.
Tier 2: Gaten Matarazzo, Caleb McLaughlin, Noah Schnapp, Finn Wolfhard, and Sadie Sink are each just over $7 million.
Tier 3: Natalia Dyer, Maya Hawke, Charlie Heaton, and Joe Keery are each just over $6 million.
Millie Bobby Brown is on her own overall arrangement with Netflix that also covers the Enola Holmes movies, so she is not slotted into those tiers.
Delays, schedules, and why the timeline stretched
The 2023 Writers Guild strike slowed things down and extended the shoot. Longer schedules cost more — overtime, holds, rebookings, you know the drill. Add the scale of those VFX shots and the mountain of footage, and post-production ran into 2025.
When you will actually get to watch it
Netflix plans to roll out Season 5 in three volumes over the 2025 holiday window, starting November 26. Eight episodes total, split into chunks — which makes sense if every chapter is built like a movie. Pace yourselves.