Warning: Spoilers follow for Stranger Things Season 4!
Stranger Things creators Matt and Ross Duffer have revealed that while Season 5 will likely be shorter than Season 4, it could very well have a Return of the King-ish ending.
Speaking to Josh Horowitz on the Happy Sad Confused podcast, the Duffer Brothers shared that they don’t expect the final season of Stranger Things to be as long as Season 4’s 13-hour run, since there won’t be as much ramping becomes. this time “before our children are really drawn into the supernatural mystery”.
“The only reason we don’t expect [Season 5] Being that long is because this season, if you watch it, it’s almost two hours before our kids really get sucked into the supernatural mystery,” said Matt Duffer. “You get to know them, you get to see them in their lives as they struggle to adjust to high school and so on… Steve is trying to find a date. All that.
“None of that is obviously going to happen in the first two episodes of this. I mean, this is the first time ever that we don’t wrap things up at the end of 4. So, it’s going to be moving at 100 mph at the start of Season 5, I don’t know, but it’s going to be moving pretty fast. The characters will already be in action, they will already have a destination and a ride, and I think that will save at least a few hours and make this season feel really different.
While the beginning of the season may start faster, the Duffer Brothers have every intention of taking their time with the end of the series. In addition to expecting the series finale to be similar in length to the two-and-a-half-hour finale of Season 4, Matt Duffer also said, “It will be ‘The Return of the King’ with eight endings. ”
While some were conflicted with the way the final Lord of the Rings movie ended or seemingly never ended, Matt Duffer believes it’s worth giving the characters a proper send-off.
“Just watching Return of the King feels like too many endings,” said Matt Duffer. “If you watch them all in a row, which I’ve done several times, it’s spot on. If it were shorter it would feel cheap and fake.”
The Duffer Brothers also chatted about how reuniting all our heroes in Hawkins “will streamline things naturally.” In addition, the team plans to come full circle with the story.
“It’s going to feel a lot bigger than Season 1,” said Matt Duffer. “We want to go back to a lot of the things we did in Season 1 and a lot of the original groupings and pairings that we had in Season 1. There’s something beautiful about coming full circle. So it’s going to feel bigger than Season 1 and a lot more massive in terms of stakes and scale, but we want to revisit a lot of things that we’ve done.”
Finally, Matt Duffer warns that everything can change as they work to bring Stranger Things to a conclusion, so it’s important to take his words with a pinch of salt.
“We’ll see,” laughed Matt Duffer. “If you had spoken to us at the beginning of this writing [Season] 4, I would have told you there were eight episodes and each was about an hour long. So I wouldn’t trust a word that comes out of my mouth.”
For more, see our recap of Stranger Things: Season 4 – Part 2, the burning questions we have after the season finale, and our conversations with Vecna actor Jamie Campbell Bower and Eddie actor Joseph Quinn about the biggest moments the 4th season.
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Adam Bankhurst is a news writer for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter @AdamBankhurst and on Twitch.