Netflix is about to dominate every holiday with Stranger Things
The fifth and final season of Netflix’s Stranger Things is dropping on Netflix just in time for Thanksgiving. And Christmas. And also New Year’s Eve.
The industry-leading streaming service, whose stock reached a record high on Monday after the weekend’s successful Tudum 2025 event, just announced that the conclusion to its monster hit series will arrive in three batches. The first four episodes are set to debut on November 26 (the day before Thanksgiving) at 8pm ET, the following three air on Christmas Day at the same time, and the final episode will come out on New Year’s Eve, also at 8pm ET. It’s an innovative, carefully calibrated twist on the staggered streaming release schedule, although some fans seem to find Netflix’s upcoming stranglehold on holiday viewing as diabolical as a demogorgon.
Streaming services can go any number of ways these days when putting out a new season of a beloved show. As they assess the right drop pattern, executives tend to consider target audience, episode length, and total number of episodes, alongside other less tangible factors such as whether the show has a 10-hour movie-style continuous story, lending itself more to the binge model, or an intense character-study vibe, which smolders as its doled out.
Netflix has been breaking up hits like Bridgerton into two batched binges for years, while Hulu sticks with full-binge for The Bear, Prime Video offers three episodes to kick off The Boys before slowing down with weekly episodes, and Max’s Hacks sometimes airs an episode or two per week with seemingly no rhyme or reason. If it could be said that there are any rules to how a streamer releases a hot show, these services are rewriting and codifying them in real time.
When Netflix released the most recent season of Stranger Things three summers ago, it set out to monopolize two close-together holidays: Memorial Day and July 4th. The first volume of the fourth season arrived on May 27, 2022, with seven episodes, and then concluded on July 1, with two more. It proved a successful scheduling gambit. All told, the season racked up a seismic 1.352 billion hours of viewing in its first 28 days, ranking as Netflix’s most-watched English-language series, and second overall after the first season of Squid Game. Even more impressive, the fourth season of Stranger Things had no small part in helping the company add 2.41 million subscribers in Q3 2022, when it dropped.
Netflix’s approach to scheduling the final season of Stranger Things takes that blatant holiday-ownership approach a step further, though. By stretching out the season across three major end-of-year holidays–during which families are frequently hunkered down together, hunting for crowd-pleasing popcorn fare–Netflix is capitalizing on its captive audience.
As if to underscore the point, the service is bumping up its usual 3am ET drop time for new releases to what is known in terrestrial TV world as “prime time,” at 8pm ET, when families are more likely to fill up couches together. It’s an ingenuous tactic for driving up end-of-year subscriptions, one that will almost certainly end up breaking viewership records. But it also feels rather brazen in its attempt to conquer all family holidays with a gargantuan four-quadrant hit.
When Netflix offered a holiday release for the second season of Squid Game last year, for instance, the service waited until the day after Christmas—perhaps out of respect for the sanctity of the holiday, or in fear of being crowded out by too many Home Alone, Elf and National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation viewings—and dropped the entire season all at once. This year, Netflix is owning its ambition to dominate the holidays. (To that end, it’s also building on last year’s Christmas Day NFL games, which collectively attracted 65 million U.S. viewers, a record for most-streamed NFL games ever, with two more Christmas Day games.) The service clearly has faith that the draw of Stranger Things wrapping up is enough to put A Muppet Christmas Carol and its ilk on the backburner for one year.
Plenty of Stranger Things fans are only too happy to have their family time supplemented by the suburban, supernatural hijinks of the world’s most twentysomething teens.
“Guess I’m spending the holidays in Hawkins this year,” a typical commenter replied to Netflix’s tweet announcing the release dates. (“And we’re happy to have ya nerd,” Netflix wrote back.)
Not all fans were as excited, though, about the way the final season is being teased out.
Some of them complained about Netflix breaking up the conclusion they’ve been waiting three years for into three chunks, prolonging their anticipation. Others seem more opposed to the idea of Netflix encroaching on so much family time with an offer Stranger Things fans can’t refuse—the TV equivalent of bumping up Black Friday deals to Thursday around dinner time.
All of them will likely tune in to watch, though, along with a billion or two fellow subscribers.
If the grand finale succeeds at the level Netflix expects it to, perhaps the end of Stranger Things will spell the beginning of a new arms race for holiday streaming content, launching in 2026.