Next year, we're officially going back to the Upside Down.
A new Stranger Things season 5 teaser arrived Wednesday as a treat for Netflix's Stranger Things Day, which always falls on Nov. 6, the day that Will Byers (Noah Schnapp) went missing in Hawkins, Ind. The drop came with a few tantalizing confirmations.
First, the final season of the runaway streaming hit will premiere sometime in 2025. Fans feared further delays as a ripple effect from the Hollywood actor and writer strikes, but they can rest easy knowing that the remaining episodes will indeed drop next year.
Second, the story will include a time jump. Ross Duffer, series co-creator with brother Matt, previously signaled in a 2022 interview with TV Line that one would be inevitable, given how the actors are now much older than they were filming season 4. "Ideally, we'd have shot [seasons 4 and 5] back to back, but there was just no feasible way to do that," he said at the time.
Season 5 will now pick up in the fall of 1987. That's more than a year after the events of season 4, which began in March 1986. When last we saw the gang, Eleven (Millie Bobby Brown), Mike (Finn Wolfhard), Will, Hopper (David Harbour), Joyce (Winona Ryder), Nancy (Natalia Dyer), and Jonathan (Charlie Heaton) were standing in a field watching as portals from the Upside Down burst open, bringing hellish horrors into the real world.
Meanwhile, Max (Sadie Sink) was still unconscious in the hospital, but the actress cryptically remarked of her character arc in season 5, "They love having me run. That's all I'll say."
The third and final tidbit released Wednesday was the collection of titles for all eight episodes of season 5. Episode 1, as we already knew from a past script page tease, is called "The Crawl." Netflix partially redacted the title for episode 2, but we know it at least starts with "The Vanishing of..." The remaining episodes are titled, "The Turnbow Trap," "Sorcerer," "Shock Jock," "Escape From Camazotz," "The Bridge," and "The Rightside Up."
Caleb McLaughlin, Gaten Matarazzo, Joe Keery, Maya Hawke, Brett Gilman, Priah Ferguson, Jamie Campbell Bower, Cara Buono, and Amybeth McNulty will return alongside the previously mentioned actors for the final season, which will also includeTerminator legend Linda Hamilton and fellow newcomers Nell Fisher, Jake Connelly, and Alex Breaux.
"This is the season the fans have been waiting for, and we hope you're as excited as we are to get to tell the final chapter in this story," Ross Duffer said in a behind-the-scenes video to mark the halfway point of filming season 5.
"If season 4 was big, season 5 definitely feels bigger," Bower, returning as Vecna, teased in that same video.
Sign up for Entertainment Weekly's free daily newsletter to get breaking TV news, exclusive first looks, recaps, reviews, interviews with your favorite stars, and more.
Appearing on a recent live taping of the Happy Sad Confused podcast at New York Comic Con, Harbour described the table read for the Stranger Things series finale episode. "The end of this episode when we were reading it, just us reading it, about halfway through, people started crying," he said. "Then about the last 20 minutes, it was just uncontrollably crying, waves of different people."
%3Amax_bytes(150000)%3Astrip_icc()%3Afocal(1459x545%3A1461x547)%2FStranger-Things-Season-5-92c1c1fc5d3442fd8a885bcf83f2decc.jpg&w=3840&q=75)