The best things come to those who wait — or in the case of Stranger Things fans, maybe it’s the most things. It’s true, it’s been ages since the third season; indeed, it dropped almost a year before there even was a pandemic. But when the fourth season and its new, scarier villain arrives starting next week, creators Matt and Ross Duffer will atone by giving plenty more than expected.
In a new interview with The Wrap, the Duffers revealed that some of the nine forthcoming episodes are going to be longer than usual — much, much longer. “Seven and nine in particular are movies,” Matt told them. “And nine is a long movie.”
How long are talking here? As per Ross, “We’re still refining it but we will say that it is over two hours. It’s a big one.”
Netflix, of course, has never had to worry about things like time slots and commercial breaks (at least for now). As such, even sitcoms, like the dearly departed reboot of One Day at a Time, could run well over the traditional half-hour-including-commercials running time. Episodes could run a full hour. They could also run some strange, modern in-between length, like 39 minutes.
And yet the Duffers still felt like they needed permission to go potentially Marvel movie long. “The more we were writing, the more we realized we need more time in order for these reveals to land, in order for these storylines to work,” Matt explained. “Partway through we knew we needed to ask Netflix for nine episodes instead of eight and as we started shooting we realized, Oh these are mega-long episodes.”
One reason they’re so long: Matt points out they had “characters spread out in three locations and we had a lot more plot. It must be quadruple the plot we had in Season 3.” They also needed to build towards Season 5, slated to be their fifth, so they needed to set things up so they could end things big.
Does this sound like a lot to binge-watch, even over a holiday weekend? Well, don’t worry, because they split the season into two volumes, the first dropping on May 27, the second one over a month later, on July 1. All of this sounds like good news for a streamer that could sure use some.
(Via The Wrap)