Netflix Admits ‘Stranger Things’ Season 4 Was Cut Short By COVID and Rising Costs
Stranger Things Season 4 landed on Netflix in two volumes, with nine supersized episodes on May 27, 2022, and July 1, 2022. The final two episodes clocked in at one hour and 25 minutes and two hours and 30 minutes. However, the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic actually shortened the season overall. Here’s what we know.
How long was ‘Stranger Things’ Season 4 altogether?
Fans who wanted more of their favorite characters in Stranger Things got their wish. We last caught up with the show when season 3 premiered in 2019. Unfortunately, the coronavirus outbreak ground the world to a halt, and that included production on Netflix’s biggest original series. Even though the show’s fourth season originally began filming toward the end of 2019, showrunners stopped everything in March 2020 and didn’t pick back up until the end of that year.
Stranger Things creators, Ross and Matt Duffer, announced at Netflix’s Tudum event in August 2021 that they planned on releasing season 4 in the summer of 2022. A few months later, the Duffer Brothers revealed that no episode in the newest season ran less than an hour long. Stranger Things Season 4 runs for a whopping 14 hours and 51 minutes if someone sat down to binge all the episodes at once.
Covid costs cut down on the length of ‘Stranger Things’ Season 4
The global pandemic had officials scrambling to take precautions to create safe working conditions for the cast and crew. Recently, Netflix co-CEO and Chief Content Officer Ted Sarandos revealed that the extra money that went into those precautions shaved off precious minutes of the series’ penultimate season.
Sarandon confessed that “Covid costs were on average about 5/10% of its content,” and that this year alone, Netflix plans to spend around $17 billion.
Sarandon continued with Deadline, “If you did that all again and took that off the top you might even get a couple of extra episodes out of it. [Stranger Things] was probably affected as any [by Covid] because of the young cast and the size and scope of the production and the multiple locations that we shot in. It was a very expensive burden on the show to make sure that we could deliver it. One of the catalysts of splitting the season was how long it took to produce that show and a lot of that was stalled because of early shutdowns of the production and being extremely careful with the cast of the show, early on in Covid.”
Does that mean fans will get even more episodes in ‘Stranger Things’ Season 5?
Even though the pandemic forced Stranger Things Season 4 to cut back on time, don’t get your hopes up for the same supersized style episodes in Stranger Things Season 5. The Duffers appeared on the Happy, Sad, Confused podcast and told host Josh Horowitz they don’t expect the final season to clock with those crazy long runtimes.
“We’re more likely to do what we did here, which is to just have a two-and-a-half-hour episode. The only reason we don’t expect to be as long is because typically — or this season, if you look at it, it’s almost a two-hour ramp up before our kids really get drawn into a supernatural mystery. You get to know them, you get to see them in their lives, they’re struggling with adapting to high school and so forth. Steve’s trying to find a date, all of that,” Matt Duffer explained.
