Stranger Things Showrunner Debunks Fake Viral Season 5 Runtimes

It’s been a big week for Stranger Things news. After a big buildup, we finally got an extensive first look at primarily the first volume of Stranger Things season 5, courtesy of a new teaser trailer (full breakdown here) and new look stills. One thing Netflix hasn’t done is confirm the episode runtimes, but over the past few days, a screenshot has been circulating, stating that all episodes are over 2 hours. It’s not accurate, however. 

The runtimes for the episodes, whose titles were revealed over a year ago, range from 2 hours and 5 minutes to 3 hours for the finale, according to the original fake image that features a watermarked “Property of Netflix” background. That’d make these some of the longest episodes in TV history, and if it seems a stretch for episodes to be this long, that’s because it is. 

Of course, there are some usual suspects spreading the fake runtimes, including a set of Gamurs Group (the troubled content company) pages that are operated out of India and Australia, with one amassing close to 100,000 likes on Facebook alone. The post reads, “THE OFFICIAL Stranger Things Season 5 episode runtimes have been revealed.” They’re not the source of the false information, as the original table was simply copied and pasted from ChatGPT with some added effects and watermarks. They’re not the only culprits, of course, we’ve seen variations of the table across X, TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook. 

The official runtimes still remain under lock and key, although the cast and crew have hinted at what we can expect. The Duffers at Next on Netflix earlier this year stated that they’d filmed over 650 hours worth of footage.

That’s changed ever so slightly from back in 2022 (before filming had started) when the Duffers stated that season 5 could be potentially shorter than season 4, but did tease that the finale would be 2.5 hours long. “The only reason we don’t expect to be as long is, [in season 4], if you look at it, it’s almost a two-hour ramp up before our kids really get drawn into a supernatural mystery,” Duffer said on the “Happy Sad Confused” podcast. “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. None of that is obviously going to be occurring [in season 5].” Of course, filming wouldn’t start for another two years after this podcast, so plans may have changed dramatically.

Maya Hawke (who plays Robin) described Season 5 as “basically eight movies,” confirming that the episodes will be “very long”. The Duffers have also referred to each episode as being a ” blockbuster movie.”

Earlier this year, Finn Wolfhard told Collider that some of the episodes will be more in line with previous seasons, saying, “Not every episode is like a full-blown movie, but there are definitely some episodes this year that the runtime is definitely film-length. But there are some episodes that are still 40/45 minutes.”

The fake runtimes have been spread far and wide to such an extent that Ross Duffer, one of the two Duffer brothers behind the show, took to Instagram stories to set the record straight, writing in a caption, “lol not even close to accurate.” 

We’ve embedded a screenshot of that Instagram story below:

As soon as we get official word on the runtime of the new episodes, we’ll keep you posted, but expect them to be under lock and key for a while longer.