Stranger Things star Caleb McLaughlin pokes fun at the long wait for season 5

It's now been over two years since we last got new episodes of Stranger Things, and the fifth and final season is still quite a ways off. Of course, the production has been far from smooth; filming was hit with myriad delays, most of all from the WGA writers' and SAG-AFTRA actors' strikes of 2023.

But now, you'll be glad to hear that production is making fantastic progress. In July, Netflix released a behind-the-scenes teaser to celebrate season 5 hitting the halfway mark in filming. The sets are bigger than ever, and the 'kids' are now adults. Check it out:

One major issue that Stranger Things has always had is the fact that the cast is aging faster than the story. Take Caleb McLaughlin, for instance, who was 14 in season 1. Going into the final season, he's 22. This problem has been the same for many of the cast, and the delays have only made things trickier.

To mock the fact that the cast is getting old, McLaughlin took to X (Twitter) to post a hilarious meme. "Sneak peek of Season 5," he wrote alongside a picture of himself, Sadie Sink and Maya Hawke, all aged up. Clearly, all those adventures in the Upside Down have taken their toll:

In season 5 we can expect more super-sized episodes. "We're making, basically, eight movies," Maya Hawke (Robin) told the Podcrushed podcast. "It is a continuation, but it's the finale. And it has been a long time since last season."

Stranger Things 4 had nine episodes, including a mammoth 144-minute finale. In the final season, there will be one less episode, but we can expect more feature-length episodes. Netflix has not set a release date yet, but we know that it'll premiere sometime in 2025.

We'll leave you with a tease from Brett Gelman, who plays journalist and conspiracy theorist Murray Bauman. "It's going great and it’s going to be amazing,” the actor told US Weekly. "The fans are going to love it."

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