We're less than two weeks out from the premiere of Stranger Things Season 4, with the long-awaited return of the hit Netflix show finally set to drop on Friday, May 27. The upcoming fourth season, which will be split into two parts, or volumes (the second of which will be released on July 1), takes place after the Battle at Starcourt Mall, which resulted in a fracturing within our main Hawkins crew. Six months later, Season 4 picks up where the story left off, as those friends left behind try to navigate the hellish hallways of high school. But that's not the only threat in store — because a new evil is lurking in Hawkins, one that arrives in tandem with a new mystery that, if solved, could finally eliminate the threat of the Upside Down once and for all.
It's no wonder, then, that Season 4 of Stranger Things is bigger than ever — not just budget-wise, with Netflix purportedly shelling out $30 million per episode, but length-wise too. The other day our own Steven Weintraub spoke with the series creators Ross and Matt Duffer, and the two revealed that Episodes 7 and 9 (the latter being the season finale) are going to be on par with the length of a feature film, which, in part, explains why it took so long for this season to finally become a reality.
"Episode 7 and 9 are very, very long episodes," Ross Duffer confirmed, to which Matt Duffer added, "Oh, yeah. Those are full-blown movies." When pressed for more details about an exact episode length, the creators also confirmed that they would be longer than any other episodes in the season, which already clock in at over an hour and fifteen minutes in runtime.
As it turns out, the Duffers initially intended eight episodes to be the plan for Season 4, but when it came time to plot out the season, they realized they needed one more to tell the story they'd envisioned. Luckily, Netflix was on board. In Ross Duffer's words:
"I think we were at least halfway, but I think probably over halfway through this season, were trying to squeeze the story in, and we sat down with our writers, and we said, "I don't think this is feasible in eight episodes". So we went to Netflix and said, "Hey, are you okay if we do one more episode?", and luckily they were very supportive of that, but that's how we ended up with that extra episode. But it was not originally planned that way. It wasn't outlined that way. It was always going to be eight. And then it just ended up being too much story."
In spite of the delays that the season experienced, not just in terms of ensuring a big scale as well as the hitches caused by the pandemic, the Duffer Brothers also confirmed that it enabled them to do something they'd never previously done in the history of the series: have the entire season's scripts fully completed by the time production began, not to mention being able to lay the groundwork for the show's planned final season throughout Season 4's story once it was outlined. As Matt Duffer added:
"We had all the scripts before we started shooting, so we could look at the whole thing as a whole, and we outlined all of Season 5. ... This was due to the six-month hiatus that we had due to the pandemic. We don't typically have as much time. It usually feels like the train is going down the tracks and Ross and I and our writers are just throwing down track as we're going, once we're halfway through the season. For the first time ever, we were able to look at it globally, not just Season 4, but Season 5 as well, and they really are of a piece."
Stranger Things Season 4 Volume 1 will be released on Netflix on May 27, with Volume 2 set to premiere less than two months later, on July 1. Look for Steve's full interview with Matt and Ross Duffer soon.