Maya Hawke Teases Long Episodes for ‘Stranger Things’ Season 5: ‘We’re Making Eight Movies’

Your binge session for Stranger Things season five is going to be a bit longer than you’d expect. Maya Hawke gave fans some new information about the upcoming season in a new interview with Penn Badgely on his Podcrushed podcast. Given that fans have long been anticipating the fifth season of the Netflix series, Maya, 25, was asked about what fans can expect, and she revealed that the episodes are going to be long.

It’s been over two years since season four of Stranger Things dropped on Netflix. Other than the SAG-AFTRA and WGA strikes that halted production for sometime, Maya revealed another reason it’s taken such a long time for the new season to come out: the episode lengths. “We’re making, basically, eight movies,” she said, via E! News. “The episodes are very long.”

Perhaps, it shouldn’t be a huge surprise for fans to learn that the episodes are going to be very long. While the series has had hour-long episodes since it began, most episodes in season four were around an hour and 15 minutes long, with the final three episodes coming in at movie length for an hour and 40 minutes, an hour and 27 minutes, and over two hours long. So fans are already adjusted to the long episode lengths.

Maya also complimented the work ethic of the show’s creators, The Duffer Brothers, and explained why it takes so long to shoot each episode. “Our showrunners, Matt and Ross [Duffer], take a lot of responsibility. They have an amazing team of writers, but they’re very involved,” she said. “They write a lot and they are very intense and serious about the quality of the continued writing, and it takes a long time to write each season, and it takes a long time to shoot them.”

Stranger Things season five’s release date hasn’t been made public yet, but it’s expected to arrive in early 2025. This is set to be the final season of the show, which debuted in 2016.