It's been three-year long wait for Stranger Things to return to Netflix, but the series will soon make its comeback this fall with its highly anticipated fifth and final season. The new episodes begin rolling out on Thanksgiving and continue on Christmas Day and New Year's Eve. Netflix is rolling out the red carpet for a high-profile three-part holiday farewell event for its most beloved original series.
But because we have been waiting so long for the final season to make its arrival, fans have been sitting on the edge of their seats searching for any and all teases. Recently, the supposed runtimes for all nine episodes of Stranger Things season 5 apparently leaked online, but co-creator and co-showrunner Ross Duffer has spoken out to debunk the runtimes as incorrect.
Stranger Things season 5 rumored episode lengths aren't real
In an Instagram Story post featuring a screenshot of the fake Stranger Things season 5 runtimes that went viral, Duffer simply stated, "lol not even close to accurate." The viral image claimed that the series finale would last for three hours in length and that the shortest season 5 episode would be just shy of two hours. Series stars Maya Hawke and Finn Wolfhard previously teased that the final run would movie-length episodes, but these apparently are not indicative of the actual runtimes.
A doctored document with a "Property of Netflix" watermark had been shared online with the episodes' titles and supposed runtimes, which ranged from one hour and 55 minutes to three hours. Most of the episodes, according to this fake list, were well over two hours in length.
Considering Netflix will be releasing the episodes in primetime, that would be quite the undertaking for fans to finish watching each part of the season on three separate holidays in order to avoid spoilers.
Even though Duffer didn't elaborate and reveal exactly which part of the fake episode runtime list is false, we can assumer that he means every single episode isn't quite that long. We know that the episodes will be rather lengthy, but these supposed runtimes were really pushing our suspension of disbelief. Could some of the runtimes be accurate? Probably. The season 4 finale was two hours and 19 minutes long, after all! But we won't find out season 5's episode lengths for quite some time.
Part of the reason that the incorrect Stranger Things season 5 episode runtimes went so viral was likely because fans of this show are actually willing and even wanting the episodes to be long. The concept of the final season consisting of two-hour episodes sounds like a real treat to most fans of the series.
After waiting as long as we have, it's only fitting that the amount of content we receive matches! But Duffer's debunking once again reminds us that we can't believe everything we read on the internet.
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