Remember those rumors about the Stranger Things Season 5 episode runtimes? Of course you do, they’ve been all over the internet for months — but now, co-creator Ross Duffer is setting the record straight on exactly how long each of the episodes of the final season will run.
Duffer took to Instagram on Monday, October 13 to share a video that seemingly showed the episodes on a version of the Netflix streaming platform that labeled them works-in-progress, clearly so they are not made public yet in the post-production stage. The screen showed the runtimes for each episode: the premiere episode, “The Crawl,” will run one hour and eight minutes. Episode 2, whose title has yet to be announced, will run 54 minutes. The third episode, titled “The Turnbow Trap,” will run one hour and six minutes, while episode four, “Sorcerer,” comes in at one hour and 23 minutes.
Duffer made sure to throw a little healthy sass in the caption of his video as well. “ACTUAL runtimes,” he wrote on his post, adding a peace sign emoji for emphasis.
Clearly, this dispels all the rumors about runtimes thus far, particularly the whisper that each episode would be over 90 minutes long. That said, we only have the runtimes for the first section of Season 5 at this point, so anything could happen in the latter two parts as far as length.
Netflix has decided to break up Stranger Things’ fifth season into three parts. The first set of episodes will air over the Thanksgiving holiday beginning on November 26 — with the next three episodes premiering on Christmas, and then a fourth and final episode premiering on New Year’s Eve. So far, we don’t have any info on the Christmas and New Year’s batch of episodes, but it seems as though we might find out more in the next month or so.
Interestingly enough, the show kept its episodes at or under an hour for much of its run — until Season 4. Last season, several episodes ended up clocking in at 70 minutes, and the last four had feature-length runtimes. The Season 4 finale specifically ran a whopping two hours and 22 minutes.
Stranger Things Season 5 will premiere on November 26, with the first four episodes of the season available at the time of release.
Lex Briscuso is a film and television critic and a freelance entertainment writer for IGN. You can follow her on Twitter at @nikonamerica.
