Stranger Things Season 5: Number of Episodes, Plot & Everything We Know

Stranger Things has become a cultural phenomenon, so the fifth and final season will be a big deal. The show will return to Netflix in late 2025. Ahead of the fifth season, here's everything we know so far about the finale: what the characters and viewers will face in the final confrontation with the Upside Down.

Will Max Survive?

Season 4 ended on a controversial note: after surviving the battle with Vecna, the characters lost him. Before his disappearance, Henry Creel managed to take control of Max.

Previously, the characters had stoically endured dangerous adventures, but this time Max's life was truly at stake. Whether she will survive will become clear very soon, but her presence in the season is undeniable: she can be seen in the photos from the set.

The Main Focus Will Be on Will Byers

In a sense, the fourth season can only be seen as a demonstration of the balance of power, a prelude to the main action, the time for which will come in the fifth season. In essence, it was a play on a familiar story with completely new capacities – not only visual, but also dramatic.

Based on this, if the fourth season was expositional, in the next season the young heroes will once again have to fight the super-villain. To do so, they will have to reunite.

The central character, according to the showrunners, will be Will Byers, the teenager with whom this story began. Alienated from the main group from the beginning, the young man has a strong, traumatic connection to the Upside Down – and it will not go unnoticed by him. The question is whether he will make it to the finale alive.

Season 5 Promises to Be the Most Epic of Them All

One of the showrunners, Matt Duffer, admitted that Netflix executives cried after reading the script for the fifth season. It seems that not all characters will make it to the end of the story.

The fifth season should be truly epic: the showrunners promise action from the very first episode. It is unlikely that they are exaggerating, because the producers allocated them from $30 to $80 million for each episode.

The team of directors of the fifth season has a serious addition: the director of The Shawshank Redemption and The Green Mile Frank Darabont will shoot several episodes of the final season. He said that he and his wife are big fans of the Netflix show.

Season 5 Number of Episodes

How long will the new adventure last? Matt Duffer claimed that the fifth season will be standard in terms of timing, unlike the fourth season: its total duration exceeded the 13-hour mark. Later, the Duffer brothers' statement changed. Ross let it slip that the show would have about eight endings – the number of episodes in the upcoming season.

Apparently, we are in for eight very dense episodes, the shooting of which Maya Hawke described as working on eight full-length movies. Which was not a joke, as Matt also mentioned the possibility of compressing the finale into a two and a half hour episode, so as not to split their number.