The rumors of the runtimes for Season 5 of “Stranger Things” have been greatly exaggerated.
Ross Duffer, who co-created the Netflix juggernaut with his brother Matt Duffer, revealed the length of the first four episodes for the final season of the show on his Instagram account on Monday. The Season 5 premiere, “The Crawl,” will run for one hour and 8 minutes; Episode 2 (with a title that has yet to be full revealed) will run 54 minutes; Episode 3, “The Turnbow Trap,” will run one hour and 6 minutes; and Episode 4, “Sorcerer,” will run one hour and 23 minutes.
The post refutes viral social media posts that have claimed that every episode of Season 5 would run at least 90 minutes long, as well as a Puck News report from Oct. 6 that the episodes “run from 90 minutes to two hours long.”
After running almost entirely at or under an hour per episode since the show premiered in 2016, “Stranger Things” Season 4 expanded significantly: All but one episode ran over 70 minutes, and the final three episodes were all feature length, with the finale clocking in at two hours and 22 minutes.
Netflix is breaking up the fifth season of the show into three discrete releases: The first four episodes will premiere on Nov. 26, over the Thanksgiving holiday, with “Sorcerer” serving as a mid-season finale. The next three episodes will premiere on Christmas, and the finale, “The Rightside Up,” will premiere on New Years Eve. Along with the Duffer Brothers, the episodes were directed by executive producer Shawn Levy and filmmaker Frank Darabont (“The Shawshank Redemption”). The full cast is returning for the final season, including Winona Ryder, David Harbour, Millie Bobby Brown, Finn Wolfhard, Gaten Matarazzo, Caleb McLaughlin, Noah Schnapp, Sadie Sink, Natalia Dyer, Charlie Heaton, Joe Keery and Maya Hawke.
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