Stranger Things Season 5 is still quite a ways away, but fans at least have a lot of Upside Down madness to look forward to when it does return.
Star Maya Hawke, who's played Robin Buckley on the hit Netflix series since its third season, provided a quick update on the fifth and final season of Stranger Things on a recent appearance on the Podcrushed podcast. She joked that the show has been "a little bit cursed," having been delayed by both the COVID-19 pandemic in the past and the writers' and actors' strikes, but another culprit for the long wait for Season 5 is also its scope.
“We’re making, basically, eight movies," Hawke said on the podcast. "The episodes are very long.”
She also elaborated on the creative process, saying showrunners Matt and Ross Duffer "take a lot of responsibility" in the scripts.
"They have an amazing team of writers, but they’re very involved," she added. "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.”
Hawke's comments echo previous ones made by executive producer and frequent episode director Shawn Levy, who called Stranger Things Season 5 "as big as any of the biggest movies that we see" in an interview with Total Film back in September.
Those are strong statements from both Hawke and Levy when you consider how massive some of the episodes in Season 4 were. The episodes varied in runtime, but they were all at least an hour, with the shortest clocking in at 63 minutes. The longest, meanwhile, was its super-sized season finale, coming in at nearly two and a half hours. It equalled roughly 13 hours for the nine-episode season.
The team hasn't specified if Season 5 will run at a similar length, but the comments from Hawke certainly make it seem that way.
Stranger Things Season 5 doesn't currently have a release date, but it did finally start filming in January following the resolution of the writers' and actors' strikes. Production likely won't be complete for some time though, as star Millie Bobby Brown said in March that they still had another nine months of filming left. That means we probably shouldn't expect Season 5 until at least mid-2025.
In the meantime, Hawke can currently be heard as the voice of Anxiety in Inside Out 2, which just raced past the $1 billion mark this weekend.
Alex Stedman is a Senior News Editor with IGN, overseeing entertainment reporting. When she's not writing or editing, you can find her reading fantasy novels or playing Dungeons & Dragons.
