‘Stranger Things’ Creators Tease Big & Personal Final Season: “It’s Like Eight Blockbuster Movies”

For guys coming off a grueling shoot to immediacy embark on an equally taxing post-production, Stranger Things creators/executive producers Matt and Ross Duffer didn’t look too run down when they took the stage at the Next on Netflix event Wednesday to tease the upcoming fifth and final season of the hugely popular series.

“We spent a full year filming this season. By the end, we’d captured over 650 hours of footage,” Ross Duffer revealed. “So, needless to say, this is our biggest and most ambitious season yet. It’s like eight blockbuster movies.”

The last statement confirms once again that the final season of Stranger Things will consist of 8 episodes. As tevealed in a teaser last November, their titles are “The Crawl,” “The Vanishing of _,” “The Turnbow Trap,” “Sorcerer,” “Shock Jock,” “Escape From Camazotz,” “The Bridge” and “The Rightside Up.”

The final chapter of the coming-of-age paranormal drama is going to be more than a giant spectacle, Matt Duffer said.

“We think it’s our most personal story,” he said. “It was super intense and emotional to film — for us and for our actors. We’ve been making this show together for almost 10 years. There was a lot of crying. There was SO much crying. The show means so much to all of us, and everyone put their hearts and souls into it. And we hope — and believe — that passion will translate to the screen.”

As confirmed at the Netflix event, Stranger Things is slated to debut later this year — likely at the end of the year given the volume of special effects and other post-production work involved.

Season 5 will pick up in the fall of 1987, more than a year after the events of season 4, which ended with Vecna opening a gate to the Upside Down, leading to mass destruction in Hawkins.

The Duffers also looked beyond the mothership series, which put the duo on the map nine years ago.

While this may be the end of the story for Mike Hopper, Dustin, Lucas, Eleven and the others, it’s not goodbye for Stranger Things,” Matt Duffer said.

The two talked about the stage prequel, Stranger Things: The Fist Shadow, which is headed to Broadway before teasing other “awesome” offshoots in the works, with spinoffs series likely among them. A Stranger Things spinoff was one of the projects the Duffers teased when they launched their Netflix-based Upside Down Pictures.

“There are more Stranger Thongs stories to tell and in the works,” Matt Duffer said. “It’s a bit early at this point to talk about them, but we’re deeply involved in every one — it’s very important to us that everything with the Stranger Things name on it is of the highest quality and not repetitive — that it has a reason to exist and always blazes its own path. And also, it needs to basically just be… awesome. Or we need to think it’s awesome. And there are a lot of what we think are awesome things on the pipeline.”