Stranger Things 4 gets a release date; season 5 will be the last

Big Stranger Things news coming down! Netflix has dropped several new posters for the show, revealed the release date for season 4, and revealed that season 5 will be the final season!

Okay, let’s take a deep breath and then walk through it.

Stranger Things season 4 release date

Netflix’s supernatural drama has been going strong for three seasons now, with showrunners Matt and Ross Duffer becoming well known for taking their time and making sure every episode is as good as it can be. Increasingly, new seasons of Stranger Things feel like event television, and the upcoming fourth season will be no exception.

The Duffers laid out their plans in an open letter dropped on Twitter today. The season will run nine episodes, but the Duffers say that it has “a runtime nearly twice the length of any previous season,” so they must be super-sized.

With that in mind, Stranger Things season 4 will have two premiere dates: the first crop of episodes will drop on Netflix on May 27, while the next will come out on July 1. We’re not sure yet how many episodes will be in each block.

The Duffers also say that season 5 will be the last season. “There are still many more exciting stories to tell within the world of Stranger Things; new mysteries, new adventures, new unexpected heroes,” they write. “But first we hope that you stay with us as we finish this tale of a powerful girl named Eleven and her brave friends, of a broken police chief and a ferocious man, of a small town called Hawkins and an alternate dimension known only as the Upside Down.”

Stranger Things posters tease a sprawling season 4

Speaking of that broken police officer, as we’ve learned from past teasers, somehow he’s a prisoner in Soviet Russia. How he swung that after seemingly dying underneath Hawkins in season 3 we have no idea. One of three new posters for season 4 teases his predicament:

Then there’s Eleven, who looks like she’ll be returning to the lab where she was tortured as a child and developed her psionic abilities:

Finally, we have the rest of the original Hawkins gang investigating a creepy old mansion known as the Creel House, which will be important to season 4:

See you soon.

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