The eagerly anticipated “Stranger Things” Season 5 won’t start filming until June, David Harbour told Collider in an interview published Monday. Since production on the hit Netflix series can take up to a year, plus extensive post-production, that means we might not see the final season until 2025.
“We’re walking into Season 5. I’ve got a couple more months to train. We start shooting that in June, though, and that will be the final season,” said Harbour.
In Season 4, his character, Jim Hopper, was noticeably slimmed down after being forced into hard labor in a bleak Russian prison, but Harbour promised we’ll soon see our favorite smalltown sheriff back to Season 3 form.
“I did a lot of training for Season 4. He was in a very specific position, that Russian prison. It was about making him a different guy and sort of shedding a layer of himself physically, mentally, and emotionally. But now he’s back in town, he’s back in America where they have cheeseburgers, so he will be well-fed,” said the actor.
The end of Season 4 found most of the characters finally back in Hawkins, which had suffered untold damage in the deadly battle with Vecna (Jamie Bower Campbell).
If Season 5 debuts in 2025, that will mark nine years for the supernatural high school drama. The Duffer Brothers-created series debuted on Netflix in July 2016. The pandemic led to a nearly three-year gap between Season 3 and Season 4, which finally debuted on May 27, 2022.
As Ross Duffer told TheWrap in May, Season 5 will be even more tragic than the preceding installments. “We do have an outline for season 5 and we pitched it to Netflix and they really responded well to it,” he said. “I mean, it was hard. It’s the end of the story. I saw executives crying who I’ve never seen cry before and it was wild.”
Duffer said at the time that fans can expect “Stranger Things” Season 5 to kick into high gear immediately.
“There’s a lot of build-up and set-up [each season], and 5 is just going to be pedal to the metal from the opening scene,” Duffer said. Good things come to those who wait!
