After nearly three years away from the spotlight, Stranger Things is finally set to return to Netflix with its fourth season later this week. Stranger Things 4 is one of the most anticipated seasons of original TV in Netflix’s history, and the streaming service is going to have quite a lot to give fans after such a long wait. This is undoubtedly the biggest season ever for a sci-fi series, with a finale that’s longer than most movies you’ll see in theaters.
Stranger Things 4 Part 1, which arrives on May 27th, contains a total of seven episodes, the last of which is one hour and 38 minutes in length. The final two episodes will be released on July 1st. Episode eight is an hour and 25 minutes. The Season 4 finale, however, is an absolute behemoth, clocking in at two and a half hours. Just that one episode of Stranger Things will be longer than Spider-Man: No Way Home.
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These runtimes are massive for any television show, but Stranger Things has been working on its fourth season for the last three years. There will be no shortage of new Stranger Things for fans to watch when it finally arrives on Netflix.
The majority of the cast of Stranger Things is returning for Season 4, but they’ll be facing off against a brand new villain from the Upside Down, perhaps the most terrifying they’ve taken on yet. Series producer and director Shawn Levy opened up to IGN about the creature known as Vecna, the frightening villain of Stranger Things 4.
“Season 4 required a villain unlike any before,” Levy said. “And it needed to be more than a creature, more than an evil cloud of particulate. It needed to be a humanoid villain with more depth, more dimension, and far more evil. That’s what Vecna is.”
At the Stranger Things 4 premiere, series star David Harbour offered some thoughts on what Vecna brings to the table in this new season. Like Levy, Harbour confirmed that the villain is much different than anything we’ve seen so far.
“Vecna is a psychological horror that I don’t think we’ve really seen,” Harbour told Variety. “The Upside Down has been this wild west world where there are creatures running around, there’s violence, but we’ve never seen something as calculatedly psychologically evil as this. That’s exciting because he is a true big bad that we’ve needed in the series.”
Stranger Things finally returns to Netflix with seven brand new episodes on May 27th.