Stranger Things is Netflix’s most popular English language show. With a staggering viewership of millions of hours across every season, this 2016 Duffer brothers creation is a massive phenomenon on the streamer, which helped raise the overall subscription ratings.
Starring Millie Bobby Brown, Noah Schnapp, Finn Wolfhard, David Harbour, Winona Ryder, Gaten Matarazzo, Caleb McLaughlin, Sadie Sink, Matthew Modine, Robert Englund, Jamie Campbell Bower and more, the series has released the first volume of the fourth season on May 27th, 2022, and will premiere the second volume on July 1st, 2022.
The showrunners have decided to end the fan-favourite show with the fifth season, which will be highly explosive and gruesome.
Previously, Stranger Things has dropped all its episodes for each season all at once, making it one of Netflix users’ top binges. However, according to some rumours, it seems like the show might aim at a potential weekly release for the fifth and final season.
“For the fans of Stranger Things, this is how they’ve been watching that show, and I think to change that on them would be disappointing,” said Peter Friedlander, the head of the scripted series for the US and Canada.
Friedlander talked about how the show is a “seasonal experience”, and the sudden format change would “be an abrupt change for the member”. Detailing further, Friedlander said that the binge model would remain, debunking all rumours. He talked about how Netflix “fundamentally” wants the members to have “the choice in how they view”.
He explained: “So giving them that option on these scripted series to watch as much as they want to watch when they watch it, is still fundamental to what we want to provide. And so when you see something like a batched season with Stranger Things, this is our attempt at making sure we can get shows out quicker to the members.”
Friedlander referred to Ozark while drawing a comparison. The fourth and final season of the show had been split into two volumes with seven episodes each, which landed on the streamer a few months apart.
Stranger Things, too, has adopted the same model for its fourth season, finishing with an epic cliffhanger that has raised fan anticipation. Friedlander talked about how this was Netflix’s “experimentation in that space” by “giving multiple-episodic viewing experiences” instead of a “standalone” experience.
Watch the first seven episodes constituting the first volume of Stranger Things season four on Netflix.
