Season 5 took nearly all of 2024 to shoot. Photo: Handout
More than nine years ago, the first season of new Netflix drama Stranger Things started shooting at EUE Screen Gems in Atlanta, the United States, on the old Lakewood Fairgrounds.
This past week, the hit show wrapped shooting its fifth and final season at the same place, though it’s now called Cinespace Studios Atlanta. An official release date has not been made, but Netflix promises new episodes will come out sometime in 2025.
Netflix on Dec 20 released a slew of behind-the-scenes photos from the past year. Season 5 took nearly all of 2024 to shoot.
Season 4 came out in May 2022. The actors and writers strikes in 2023 delayed the start of production of Season 5 by several months.
The final season, consisting of eight episodes, will include a time jump to the fall of 1987, about six months after the events of Season 4.
The key younger actors, many of whom were preteens when the show began shooting in 2015, are now in their early 20s but are still playing high school students.
The situation in Hawkins was dire at the end of Season 4 as the Upside Down unleashed nightmares upon the town. Max (Sadie Sink) was revived by Eleven after being killed by Vecna (Jamie Campbell Bower) but remained comatose in the hospital.
When doing a table read of the series finale episode in October, actor David Harbour told the Happy Sad Confused podcast “about halfway through, people started crying. Then about the last 20 minutes, it was just uncontrollably crying, waves of different people.”
Netflix last month also released the names of each episode: The Crawl, The Turnbow Trap, Sorcerer, Shock Jock, Escape From Camazotz, The Bridge and The Rightside Up.
The show is one of Netflix’s most popular shows of all time, and creators the Duffer Brothers were given a lot of creative and financial license to make the show they wanted to make. This is part of the reason why it has taken so long between seasons – The Atlanta Journal-Constitution/Tribune News Service
