One of the most highly anticipated 2025 TV premieres by a long shot, Stranger Things Season 5 is set to send viewers into frightful and tearful tizzies when it finally hits streaming this year. I have a not-so-sneaking suspicion that not all of our favorite characters are going to survive final stretch, and Finn Wolfhard’s latest comments about the horror-drama’s swan song have me feeling all the more emotional about saying farewell, largely due to his Toy Story 3 comparison.
While there are plenty of Pixar fanatics who find Woody and Buzz’s second adventure to be the best of the Toy Story franchise, plenty of others consider Toy Story 3 to be the animated film series’ most emotionally rounded effort. And it’s the latter group that Finn Wolfhard likely connected with the most through his comments made to Variety about his very last day on the set of the global smash. In his words:
It was incredibly emotional, obviously. It’s the last 10 years of my life. Also for the creators, the Duffer Bros. started when they were 30 and now they are 40. Everyone had a long journey and shared it together. My whole childhood was there. It was sort of the Toy Story 3 moment of leaving your toys behind. It was really special.
Spending a full decade on any creative endeavor is an accomplishment, but relatively few people can say they’ve co-starred in one of the most-watched TV series of the streaming era, or that their show is among the flagship series that helped the already successful Netflix crush its online competition. In that respect, Finn Wolfhard gets to be part of a privileged group.
And in the same way that Toy Story 3’s generational transition has Andy coming to terms with gifting his box of beloved-if-ignored to the young and playful Bonnie, I know I’m not the only parent who enjoyed Stranger Things alone before later sharing that small-screen pleasure with one’s child. And I’m probably not the only one who thinks the lazy-eyed Big Baby is as tragically horrifying as anything Matt and Ross Duffer have concocted for the Hawkins squad.
With the 2023 Hollywood strikes causing production hiccups for Stranger Things as much as anything else, the series finally wrapped filming in December 2024, after keeping the cast and crew busy for nearly the entire year. And even though Wolfhard isn’t yet fully able to promote Mike Wheeler’s final outing, the whole reason he’s able to talk about it at all is because he’s promoting his new 2025 film The Legend of Ochi, which he brought up in saying:
We had a long last year. We shot sort of ‘Lord of the Rings’ style with a year-long shoot. It was a great way to go out and very intense. I feel like it couldn’t have ended better. [The Legend of Ochi] is the first movie that I’m promoting since, so it feels like post-graduation or something. I am excited for everything to come out.
Will the final season have us crafting no-nonsense comparisons between Jamie Campbell Bower’s Vecna and TS3’s Lots-o’-Huggin’ Bear? Probably not, because not even Vecna is capable of Lotso’s truly malicious brand of evil. Wait no, hold on, Vecna is definitely worse.
We’re still waiting on a formalized release date for Stranger Things Season 5, or at least the first batch of episodes, so join us in running up that hill to hang out with Bonnie and her box of friends.
