The final season of ‘Stranger Things’ will drop in three parts

1 June, 2025

Stranger Things video game

The release dates for Stranger Things‘ fifth and final season have been confirmed, with episodes set to drop on the streamer in three parts.

The first volume of episodes will be released on November 26, 2025 – just before Thanksgiving – at 5pm Pacific time. This will be followed by a second volume on Christmas Day at the same time, while the show’s finale will arrive on New Year’s Eve.

A new teaser trailer has been shared to coincide with the announcement. It begins with Joyce Byers (Winona Ryder) talking to Will (Noah Schnapp) about the night he disappeared in 1983 at the beginning of the show.

“I think about that night all the time,” she says. The trailer then runs through clips of climactic moments from across the show’s previous four seasons before offering a glimpse of what’s to come. Joyce is shown holding an axe, waiting for something to burst through a door, while we also see Lucas (Caleb McLaughlin) by Max’s (Sadie Sink) hospital bed where she remains comatose.

At the end, we see Will screaming, “Run!”

The final season will be set in the fall of 1987, in keeping with the show’s traditional gaps of around a year between each season’s story. It will be set entirely in Hawkins as opposed to previous seasons going to California and Russia.

The episode titles are:

The Crawl
The Vanishing Of…
The Turnbow Trap
Sorcerer
Shock Jock
Escape From Camazotz
The Bridge
The Rightside Up

Filming for season five began in January 2024 and in July, (the eight-year anniversary of Stranger Things season one) Netflix confirmed that the team were halfway through production. The streamer ended 2024 by sharing photos from a wrap party, with Stranger Things season five finishing filming in time for Christmas. 

Speaking to Netflix, Sadie Sink said the cast were “savouring every minute” of the experience, knowing the end is nigh. Netflix also shared a behind-the-scenes look at production and in an interview with NME, Gaten Matarazzo (who plays Dustin) said wrapping up the show was a “satisfying, cathartic process”.

Co-creator Ross Duffer said in April that fans could expect an “emotional, thrilling” fifth season. During the Broadway opening for Stranger Things: The First Shadow, Ross went on to tell The Hollywood Reporter: “It’s the end of a long journey, for everyone who made the show and also for those characters.

“It is thrilling and it’s our fastest start we’ve ever had — our heroes are in action right away, but I think ultimately, hopefully, it’s our most emotional season yet. Those final episodes, the goal is that they hit pretty hard because in a lot of ways it’s about the end of this journey we’ve all had and also the end of childhood.”

Noah Schnapp, who plays Will Byers in the series, said at the same time that fans would be left “devastated” by the new episodes, but added: “As sad as it was, I’m so excited to see the world’s reaction to watching the finale because there’s not going to be a dry eye, it’s going to be sad. Not to be so negative, it is a really great season and people will love it.”

In a four-star review of Stranger Things season four part one, NME wrote: “While there are some gripes to be had with the penultimate season of the show, it still packs in all the terrifying thrills you’d expect, deftly blending horror and sci-fi to maximum effect while still allowing for some laughs among the bleakness. It’s a finely-tuned formula that’s given us yet another sublime season and, hopefully, one more to come.”

And while the show might be coming to an end soon, the title of Netflix’s animated spin-off series was revealed earlier this week. Stranger Things: Tales From ‘85 is its name, and it’s currently in the works.

The Duffer Brothers told Netflix’s Tudum: “We’ve always dreamed of an animated Stranger Things in the vein of the Saturday morning cartoons that we grew up loving, and to see this dream realised has been absolutely thrilling.”

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