‘Stranger Things’ 5 confirms 1-year time jump, 2025 premiere for final season

Next year we are officially going back to the Upside Down.

A new one Stranger Things Season 5 teasers arrived Wednesday as a treat for Netflix Stranger Things Day that always falls on November 6, the day Will Byers (Noah Schnapp) disappeared in Hawkins, Ind. The fall came with a few tantalizing confirmations.

First, the final season of the runaway streaming hit will premiere sometime in 2025. Fans feared further delays as a spillover from the Hollywood actor and writer strikes, but they can rest easy knowing that the remaining episodes will drop next year.

Second, the story will feature a time jump. Ross Duffer, the series’ co-creator with brother Matt, previously signaled in a 2022 interview with TV Line it would be inevitable, given how the actors are now much older than they were filming season 4. “Ideally we would have shot (seasons 4 and 5) back to back, but there was just no feasible way to do it, ” he said at the time.

Season 5 now picks up in the fall of 1987. That’s more than a year after the events of season 4, which began in March 1986. Last we saw the gang, Eleven (Millie Bobby Brown), Mike (Finn Wolfhard), Will, Hopper (David Harbor ), Joyce (Winona Ryder), Nancy (Natalia Dyer) and Jonathan (Charlie Heaton) stood in a field and watched as portals from the Upside Down opened, bringing the horrors of Hell into the real world.

Meanwhile, Max (Sadie Sink) was still unconscious in the hospital, but the actress cryptically noted about her character arc in Season 5: “They love having me run. That’s all I’m going to say.”

The third and final tidbit released on Wednesday was the collection of titles for all eight episodes of Season 5. Episode 1, as we already knew from an earlier script page, is called “The Crawl.” Netflix partially redacted the title for episode 2, but we know it at least starts with “The Vanishing of…” The remaining episodes are called “The Turnbow Trap,” “Sorcerer,” “Shock Jock,” “Escape From Camazotz ” “,” “The Bridge” and “The Rightside Up.”

Caleb McLaughlin, Gaten Matarazzo, Joe Keery, Maya Hawke, Brett Gilman, Priah Ferguson, Jamie Campbell Bower, Cara Buono and Amybeth McNulty will return along with the previously mentioned actors for the final season, which will also includeTerminator legend Linda Hamilton and fellow newcomers Nell Fisher, Jake Connelly and Alex Breaux.

“This is the season fans have been waiting for, and we hope you’re as excited as we are to tell the final chapter of this story,” Ross Duffer said in a behind-the-scenes video to mark the halfway point. point of filming season 5.

“If Season 4 was big, Season 5 definitely feels bigger,” Bower, who returned as Vecna, teased in the same video.

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Appearing on a recent live recording of Happy Sad Confused podcast at New York Comic Con, Harbor described the table read for Stranger Things the last episode of the series. “The end of this episode, when we read it, just reading it, about halfway through, people started crying,” he said. “Then for about the last 20 minutes it was just uncontrollable crying, waves of different people.”