Stranger Things Season 4 ended on an alarming cliffhanger, and now fans are eagerly awaiting the release date of the show’s last, fifth, and final season on Netflix. In an interview with Collider’s Editor-in-Chief Steve Weintraub following the almost four-hour Volume 2, series creators Matt and Ross Duffer previewed the impending final season, including when it would be available on Netflix. Were the Duffers aiming for a certain release date for Season 5 of Stranger Things? Weintraub asked. Matt Duffer’s response was this: “You never know unless you ask. Do you get what I’m trying to say here? And it is still a mystery.
If you ask our AD and our line producer, they’d like extra time to put the film together. We need extra time for post-production, according to our post-production supervisor. In other words, there’s going to be a lot of debate. How much time do we all get? In other words, when production and post-production are slashed, more things become compromised.” For the rest of his remarks, Duffer explained that the Stranger Things writing and the directorial team wants to make sure that they offer the greatest possible version and that requires several moving components. As a television programme, Stranger Things is no exception. There are a plethora of processes that must be taken before a season can begin production.
Duffer went on to explain: “It’s just a question of weighing the pros and cons of rushing the programme to completion. What if it’s more vital to allow enough time for everyone to get it properly without being overly indulgent?’ If we ever find it out, I won’t be surprised. My entire issue was that I wasn’t too stressed.” A little over six months after Season 3 of the epic sci-fi series premiered on Netflix, the COVID epidemic struck. The brothers’ Duffer, of course, is no stranger to long breaks. After a long gap, Matt Duffer says he wasn’t concerned about their schedule, and he seemed to have the same enthusiasm for Season 5 as he did in Season 4. “In the absence of COVID, the gap between grades three and four would have been longer than three years, according to Duffer.
As a child of the ’90s, I was never as concerned about it as some others because I had to wait at least a few years for movie sequels. If not, then at least a few more seconds.” Also, “I mean, look at James Cameron,” he says in reference to the long gap between Avatar sequels.
The Duffer Brothers aren’t going to pull a James Cameron and wait 13 years for the next part of their movie-style series just because quality is their number one concern. According to Matt Duffer, “We want it as quickly and effectively feasible, but we also want it to be the best it can possibly be.” He went on to remark, “I believe Ross and I will always place a premium on superiority. It’s preferable to have a quality product rather than a fast one, in my opinion.”
“Our visual effects crew, what they accomplished, we were handing this material over in September and October [with] the quantity of visual effects shots that are in a Marvel movie done in a pretty rapid turnaround,” Ross Duffer said while speaking about what went into Season 4 after the pandemic-induced delay. A lot will depend on how long the scripts for Season 5 are going to be. Considering that Upside Down has invaded Hawkins in Season 4, we should expect a significant amount of visual effects work in the final season.
According to Matt Duffer, the Season 4 finale alone has “more visual effects than the whole Season 3.” The Duffers also said that the fifth and final season of the show would begin writing in early August. With the writing process taking a few months, we may expect Season 5 of Stranger Things to begin production sometime in 2017. In light of the series’ extensive post-production needs, we may probably expect a return to Hawkins and the Upside Down around 2025.