netflix
On Monday, Netflix released a new behind-the-scenes featurette of the Stranger Things cast and some of the new sets for the fifth and final season of the popular series.
“biggest season yet ✔️ worth the wait ✔️ half-way through filming ✔️ enjoy a look behind the scenes of the making of the fifth and final season of Stranger Things!” Netflix wrote in an Instagram post.
Yes, that’s right. The fourth season of Stranger Things was released in two parts in May and July of 2022 and the fifth season of the series is still only halfway through production.
By the time all is said and done, Stranger Things will have released five seasons (42 episodes in total) over nine years.
In the new behind-the-scenes featurette, we get our first look at some of the new cast members including Linda Hamilton, Nell Fisher, Jake Connelly and Alex Breaux.
“I started when I was 10. I’m now turning 20 years old,” Millie Bobby Brown says at one point in the video. “It feels very weird!”
“It’s just so exciting, I think this is going to be the best season yet,” says another OG cast member Noah Schnapp.
“We’re just kind of savoring every single moment,” Sadie Sink, who joined the cast in season two, says.
So why is season five, which is expected to be released sometime in 2025, taking so long to produce?
According to season three cast addition Maya Hawke on a recent episode of Podcrushed, “We’re making, basically, eight movies.”
“Our showrunners, Matt and Ross, take a lot of responsibility. They have an amazing team of writers, but they’re very involved. They write a lot and they are very intense and serious about the quality of the continued writing, and so it takes a long time to write each season, and a long time to shoot them.”
Don’t believe her? Take it from one of those guys doing all of the writing.
“This season – it’s like season one on steroids,” Matt Duffer, one half of the creative team (along with his brother Ross) recently told The Guardian.
“It’s the biggest it’s ever been in terms of scale, but it has been really fun, because everyone’s back together in Hawkins: the boys and Eleven interacting more in line with how it was in season one. And, yes, there may be spin-offs, but the story of Eleven and Dustin and Lucas and Hopper, their stories are done here.”