The final chapter of Stranger Things keeps getting closer, and fans finally have clarity on the real runtimes for the beginning of Season 5! After weeks of exaggerated rumors claiming every episode would run at least 90 minutes, Ross Duffer shut everything down on October 13, 2025, by revealing the official lengths of the first four episodes. The premiere, titled “The Crawl,” clocks in at one hour and eight minutes. Episode 2 lands at fifty-four minutes, Episode 3 hits one hour and six minutes, and Episode 4 runs to one hour and twenty-three minutes.
Season 5 arrives in three drops, and Netflix is leaning all the way into the holidays: Volume 1 premieres on November 26 with the 4 episodes mentioned above, possibly ending on the mid-season cliffhanger. The next three episodes land on Christmas Day, and the grand finale, “The Rightside Up,” will close out the series on New Year’s Eve.
Most recently, social media hyped up the season finale on November 18, 2025, with a new tweet referencing the confirmed runtimes. The post came with a picture that flashed a VHS-style callback to every season. The story will continue in the fall of 1987, with Hawkins in danger by the time the Rifts open. The characters have one mission: find and kill Vecna, but he has vanished, and his whereabouts and plans are unknown. Making things more difficult, the government has put the town under military quarantine, which has forced Eleven back into hiding. To end this dark chapter, they’ll need to come together one last time and defeat the forces of evil.