Most-watched series in Netflix history ends night with movie-length episode: 'It really comes down to the final minutes'

“Stranger Things,” which premiered on Netflix in 2016, will end its fifth season on the night of the year, with the American streaming platform planning a grand finale for what it has calculated to be the most-watched series it has ever produced.

• Episode 8 that will conclude season 5 of “Stranger Things” and with it the entire series will be available on Netflix starting January 1st at 03:00. The unusual release time is due to the fact that in the US the episode will also be released in cinemas.

“For us, everything really comes down to those final minutes of the series, because we knew we could make ten hours of great entertainment that people love, but if you stumble at the end, right before the finish line, that's what people will be talking about,” said Ross Duffer, one of the two creators of the series, in an exclusive interview for the HotNews.ro audience.

“We've seen that happen with so many great, long-running shows, and so a lot of time was spent making sure those final minutes were great. And we actually had the basic idea for it for a very long time, years and years, so when we started writing with the other fellow writers, that's where we started,” Ross Duffer added in the interview.

Brothers Ross and Matt Duffer are the creators, head writers, directors and executive producers of Stranger Things. The two spoke with Hotnews.ro before the release of the first 4 episodes of season 5 on November 27.

“We started with those last ten minutes and we talked about them, and we made sure we felt confident that those last ten minutes were going to be great, and then we kind of built the season around them, making sure that every choice we made led to those final minutes, and that gave us the confidence going forward,” explained Ross Duffer.

The final episode of “Stranger Things” is as long as a movie

More than a year before the appearance of season 5, rumors began to circulate among fans and in the press specialized in the film industry that all the episodes of the last season will have the length of a feature film. The Duffer brothers eventually debunked the speculation, and Netflix later confirmed that only the last episode to air on the night would be the length of a movie: two hours and 5 minutes.

As a result, Netflix decided to release it in the United States and in theaters.

In a message published on Instagram the other day, Ross Duffer revealed that 1.1 million people have booked tickets in the US to see the finale Stranger Things on New Year's Eve

He also stated that tickets for 3,500 screenings, in over 620 American cinemas, were completely sold out.

The amazing numbers that the series “Stranger Things” had on Netflix

Variety magazine showed as early as December 23, before the release of episodes 4-7, that the fifth and final season helped Netflix set new audience records: the season had the biggest debut week in the history of the streaming platform for an English-language series. Data published by Netflix then showed that the series Stranger Things has surpassed 1.2 billion total views as a whole.

This statistic, calculated by dividing the total time any part of the series was ever watched by the cumulative length of all available episodes, places Stranger Thingsas a whole, above any other series in Netflix history — including above Wednesday and Squid Game. These were the only productions with individual seasons ranking above the previous season of Stranger Things.

Released in 2022, Season 4 remains #2 on Netflix's ranking of the most popular English-language titles in the platform's history. Season 3, which is over 6 years old, has only recently come off this chart.

The new season has reached 102.6 million views in less than a month, with Variety noting that Season 5 is almost guaranteed to enter January as Netflix's all-time viewership. Netflix calculates its “all-time” rankings up to 91 days after each series' final episodes air, meaning Season 5 will continue to count for three months after the grand finale. According to Variety , the new and final season has a strong chance of reaching No. 1 in the first quarter of 2026.

In addition, season 5 of Stranger Things ranked after the debut of the new season as the most watched title of the week in 90 of the 93 countries monitored by Netflix and motivated many subscribers to watch previous seasons. Stranger Things it thus became the first Netflix series to have four seasons simultaneously in the real-time ranking of Netflix's most watched series, and then all five seasons climbed into the top 10.

The Netflix series has become a pop culture phenomenon

But the magnitude of the phenomenon Stranger Things it's not just about Netflix views.

The series attracted international media attention after the use of the song Running Up That Hill for the Season 4 soundtrack. 38 years after the song's release, Stranger Things helped British singer Kate Bush score her first Billboard Top 10 hit in the US. Also, the song Master of Puppets (1986) by Metallica entered the UK Top 10 for the first time after being used that season.

With season 5, this effect was repeated again. According to Spotify, several classic tracks have seen dramatic increases in the number of listens on the platform after their appearance in the first episodes of the new season of Stranger Things. Among Generation Z, the track Upside Down (1980) by Diana Ross saw a 1,250% increase in listens, and I Think We're Alone Now (1987) by Tiffany increased by 880%.

At the level of all audience categories, listening for Mr. Sandman (1954) by The Chordettes rose 625%, and for Fernando (1976) by ABBA by 335%, with the latter up 645% among Gen Z. The music streaming platform's data also shows that its users have created 205,000 themed playlists Stranger Things since the debut of Season 1 in 2016.

“Season five was our opportunity to do everything we always wanted to do with the series. I feel like we were able to include in season five everything we wanted to do and say, and we spent a lot of time making sure it would be like that,” Matt Duffer told HotNews.ro. The interview with the two creators of Stranger Things can be read in full below: