Winona Ryder teases "bittersweet" Stranger Things ending

If Stranger Things followed a regular release schedule, it would've all been wrapped up by now. But things being the way they are, with the show being hit with myriad delays from the pandemic and the WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes, we have to wait until 2025 for the story to reach its conclusion.

Filming on the fifth and final season has been ongoing since January, and most of the cast have weighed in on the show's ending (without revealing too much, of course). We've had Millie Bobby Brown (Eleven) confess that it's a "really weird" feeling for the series to be coming to an end, while Maya Hawke (Robin) talked about the draining process of making "basically eight movies." There seems to be a shared feeling of excitement and pride, mixed with a dose of exhaustion.

The latest to offer up thoughts on the final season is Winona Ryder (Joyce Byers). “We're still filming, it’s still happening till the end of the year,” she told E! News. “It's going to be bittersweet.”

Speaking about her 10-year span on the show, Ryder likened the experience to working on Beetlejuice. Nobody expected Stranger Things to blow up the way it did, becoming a cultural phenomenon. “It is the 10th year of that, which is wild,” she said. “I could never I never imagined it would, you know, it's sort of like Beetlejuice. I don't think any of us anticipated that show becoming what it did.”

The Stranger Things 4 finale left the quaint town of Hawkins on the brink of collapse. Following the battle against Vecna, who still looms large, the Upside Down landscape began to spill into the real world. The team is left in disbelief as the war, clearly, is only just beginning.

Stranger Things 5 doesn't have a release date yet. We estimate that it'll premiere sometime in 2025, almost a decade after the journey started.

Winona Ryder's latest project is Tim Burton's Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, which premieres September 6.

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