We’re just over a week away from the premiere of Stranger Things season 4 on Netflix, and bits of information are slipping through the floodgates. We’ve known for a while now that Stranger Things 4 would feature nine super-sized episodes…but just how super-sized are we talking?
According to series creators Matt and Ross Duffer, very, very long. The Duffers talked to The Wrap about the new season, saying that they hadn’t planned for the episodes to run as long as they did; it just kind of happened.
Matt Duffer explained how, once they geared up to make season 4, the show’s line producer came to the conclusion that it was going to be roughly double the size of season 3. “I just said ‘No, I don’t think so,'” Matt replied. He’d soon be proven wrong.
Stranger Things 4 has “quadruple the plot” of season 3
Many of the details about Stranger Things 4 are still being kept under wraps, but given previous comments from the Duffer Brothers, it’s safe to expect episodes to sit at over an hour each. According to Matt Duffer, the length came about organically:
"A lot of it had to do with the fact that we had characters spread out in three locations and we had a lot more plot. It must be quadruple the plot we had in Season 3. That was our fun blockbuster season. This season we knew that Season 5 was going to be our last, we had to start revealing a lot."
If season 3 was the fun blockbuster season, season 4 is what the Duffers have called their “Game of Thrones season,” with multiple storylines running at the same time. Hopper (David Harbour), who somehow survived the explosion in the season 3 finale, is captive in a Russian prison. Eleven (Millie Bobbie Brown) and the Byers family have moved out to California. And the gang still living in Hawkins will be forced to unravel the mystery of a new villain, Vecna, who may hold the answers to some of the show’s biggest mysteries.
“The more we were writing, the more we realized we need more time in order for these reveals to land, in order for these storylines to work,” Matt said. “Partway through we knew we needed to ask Netflix for nine episodes instead of eight and as we started shooting we realized, Oh these are mega-long episodes.”
The Stranger Things 4 finale is “over two hours”
With the longer run times, episodes of Stranger Things 4 are more like short movies than TV episodes. “Seven and nine in particular are movies,” Matt Duffer said. “And nine is a long movie.”
When pressed on the run-time for the season finale, Duffer coyly replied that, “We’re still refining it but we will say that it is over two hours. It’s a big one.”
So there you have it: episodes of Stranger Things 4 are massive, and the season finale is the most massive of all. At over two hours, saying it’s “practically a movie” is a misnomer; that’s just outright movie length. So if you’ve missed your pals in Hawkins, Indiana, you’re going to see more of them than ever this summer.
Volume I of Stranger Things 4 drops May 27 on Netflix, with Volume II following on July 1. It is not currently known how many of the nine episodes will be in each volume.
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