Netflix announces premiere dates, plural, for the final season of ‘Stranger Things’

(From left) Millie Bobby Brown, Noah Schnapp, Finn Wolfhard, Charlie Heaton and Eduardo Franco star in 'Stranger Things.' (Courtesy of Netflix via CNN Newsource)

The official release dates for Season 5 of Netflix’s beloved supernatural series “Stranger Things” have been announced, and yes – there’s more than one.

The show’s final season is set to hit the streamer in three chunks, with “Volume 1” premiering on November 26, “Volume 2” on Christmas Day, and the grand finale on New Year’s Eve. The long-awaited debut dates were revealed on Saturday during Netflix’s “Tudum 2025: The Live Event,” where Lady Gaga performed as the platform revealed various other details about content coming in the rest of 2025 and into 2026. (Gaga will appear in Season 2 of the streamer’s hit series “Wednesday.”)

For “Stranger Things,” core cast members Noah Schnapp, Caleb McLaughlin and Finn Wolfhard came out onstage at the Netflix event to reminisce about memories of making the show over the near decade since it premiered back in 2016. Their costars Millie Bobby Brown and Gaten Matarazzo each joined over video for the occasion as well.

A release date for Season 5 is a welcome announcement, as viewers have been waiting since way back in 2022 – when Season 4 aired and viewers were introduced to the terrifying Vecna (Jamie Campbell Bower) – for the show to return for its final installment. The delay between seasons was, in part, due to the actors’ and writers’ strikes of 2023 that ran into the show’s production window.

“Stranger Things” follows a group of teenagers and their families as they face off against an unnamed evil lurking in what’s known as the “Upside Down,” a mirror dimension existing underneath their small Indiana town.

The dark, retro-style series has been one of Netflix’s most-viewed series and has won 12 Primetime Emmys thus far.

Along with the above-mentioned actors, Winona Ryder, David Harbour, Joe Keery, Natalia Dyer, Matthew Modine and Charlie Heaton star in the series. Additional cast members, who all became breakout stars, include Sadie Sink, Priah Ferguson, Joseph Quinn and Maya Hawke.

Netflix announced in 2023 that “Terminator” star Linda Hamilton is set to be a guest star on Season 5.

The final season began filming in 2024, according to a post on the official Netflix X page, and wrapped in December.

In January, Ross and Matt Duffer, the creators of the series, shared a behind-the-scenes glimpse at the final season, revealing at the time that they’d spent an entire year filming it and had captured over 650 hours of footage.

“It’s like eight blockbuster movies. It’s pretty insane,” Ross Duffer said at the time.

Matt Duffer added that it “was super intense and emotional to film – for us and for our actors. We’ve been making this show together for almost ten years. There was a lot of crying. There was SO much crying.”

Article written by Alli Rosenbloom, CNN