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The upside-down is still the right way for Netflix – Stranger Things 5 is now the company’s biggest English-language debut ever.
The fifth season of the streaming company’s flagship sci-fi series achieved 59.6m views in its first five days on the platform, making for the best premiere week for an English-language series ever on Netflix, and the third biggest debut overall behind the second and third seasons of the Korean sensation Squid Game.
The huge debut, which saw the first four of the final eight episodes drop at once, also marks a significant jump in viewership from the fourth installment, which opened to 287m hours watched in 2022, when Netflix measured viewership in stream time instead of views. That total translates to about 22m views, meaning season 5 saw a 171% increase, according to Variety, though it should be noted that the fifth season total included five days of viewing, while Stranger Things 4’s premiere only counted three.
The day before the long-awaited final season, all previous Stranger Things seasons landed in Netflix’s top 10, a first for any show on the streaming platform. The influx of viewers caused the platform to temporarily freeze during the premiere, even after Netflix “increased bandwidth by 30% to avoid a crash”, according to the series co-creator Ross Duffer on his Instagram.
Stranger Things premiered on Netflix in 2016, and quickly became one of the most popular English-language series on the platform. The show launched the career of Millie Bobby Brown, one of the first in-house Netflix stars, as well as those of Joe Keery, Natalia Dyer, Charlie Heaton, Finn Wolfhard, Noah Schnapp, Caleb McLaughlin, Sadie Sink and Gaten Matarazzo.
The fifth season returns once again to Hawkins, Indiana, the fictional small town beset by increasingly ominous otherworldly activity in the 1980s – though with a time jump this time, to accommodate for the former child stars who have now aged into adults. Series regulars Winona Ryder and David Harbour also reprise their roles.
The final chapter has been three years in the making and hotly anticipated, with the co-creators, brothers Matt and Ross Duffer, teasing that it will feature “the most violent death of any season”.
The Guardian’s Jack Seale praised the first half of the finale – particularly the fourth, feature-length episode, a “solidly thrilling 90 minutes of flame-throwing, bullet-dodging spectacle that makes good use of what looks like a virtually limitless effects budget, and which culminates in a moment that will have fans standing on their chairs and hollering joyfully”.
Stranger Things 5 will wrap later this month, with three episodes premiering on Christmas Day. The series finale will air on 31 December.
