After running for nearly a decade, Netflix’s mega-hit Stranger Things was set to come to a close in 2025. In an effort to turn the release of what was destined to be one of the most heavily-watched releases in Netflix history into a multi-week extravaganza, the decision was made to release the season in three distinct chunks: Volume I (the first four episodes) on the night before Thanksgiving, Volume II (the next three episodes) on Christmas, and the finale on New Year’s Eve. This was a massive gamble of a release schedule, and its one that is largely responsible for the divisive reception which Stranger Things 5 is receiving.
In order to understand why Stranger Things 5 was released this way, you have to take a look back at the evolution of the show and Netflix’s release schedules in prior years. For its first three seasons, Stranger Things released entire seasons simultaneously, with every episode of a given new season unleashed at the same time on Netflix. This was indicative of how the streaming platform as a whole handled releases during its earlier years; it offered a stark alternative to the weekly release schedule of standard television and gave birth to the popularity of binge watching.
However, by the time season 4 rolled around, things had begun to change. Netflix had begun to experiment with the idea of staggering release schedules for new seasons of shows, realizing the obvious benefit that provided in keeping subscribers onboard that much longer to watch their favorite show. As a result, Stranger Things 4 was released in two different volumes, a few weeks apart from one another, to remarkable success.
Following this, Netflix made volume-centric release dates standard for many of their most popular shows. As such, the question of how or if this momentum would be carried forward into Stranger Things 5 weighed heavy on many peoples’ minds. There were even reports that the show’s creators, the Duffer Brothers, tried to convince Netflix to go in on a full-blown weekly release schedule with this season to no avail. (A claim which has since been debunked by Ross Duffer.) Ultimately, the streaming giant picked out three dates over the holiday season and divvied the season up accordingly.
However, to do this was to completely fail to take into account that those holidays are some of the busiest days of the year for the vast majority of viewers, as well as how viewing habits have changed so substantially in recent years. As a result, many of the biggest plot beats and revelations that were housed within these new episodes were being talked about at length and fully spoiled on social media platforms mere hours after being released. Due to the way that algorithms function now, if someone has interacted with posts relating to a show like Stranger Things in the past, the given app will automatically feed them new content pertaining to it, resulting in fans essentially being express fed spoilers for the show they like before they even get a chance to watch it.
The largest ramification of this manifested in the immediate response to Volume II’s release, which saw people criticizing the show and its final season in droves. Part of this is the weird segmentation of the release (these three episodes were quieter, more stilted episodes that didn’t work at all when amputated from the ones that preceded them or the finale which is set to succeed them) and another part is this broken information pipeline. If fans see that people are responding negatively to the episodes on social media before they ever even get a chance to watch them themselves because of the busy holiday season, then their perception of the episodes is going to immediately be filtered through a more critical, negative lens. This is doubly true given how popular video-sharing platforms have become, enabling users to post clips from the episodes without context and frame them in extremely unflattering ways.
Essentially, Netflix elected the worst release schedule possible for this final season of Stranger Things. Had the season been released in a more standard fashion, divvied up into fewer parts and released on any normal set of days, the reception would have likely been very different. However, as it stands, the streaming platform and Stranger Things showed their worst side to audiences at the worst possible time.