I went to the Stranger Things finale in theaters and the strangest thing happened

The parking lot was full. This is the first strange thing.

A little background. Almost every mall is struggling now, but Neshaminy Mall in Bensalem, Pennsylvania, is more or less bankrupt. As turncoatDan McQuade, a Pennsylvanian and lifelong fan of the mall, wrote in his memoir of the shopping center, that the once bustling complex is mostly a closed ghost town, half of which is about to be demolished. There are only two real reasons to go there: a well-stocked Barnes & Noble and an AMC movie theater.

And people go there to watch movie theaters. It is one of only three theaters in the Philly area with IMAX screens, making it a destination for fans of the iconic formats. I’m there often in my job as a critic, and I’m used to a packed IMAX auditorium. Parking lot outside the theater at 8 pm on New Year’s Eve, the night of its performance Stranger Things 5: The FinaleHowever, it was on another level. The concession line was tremendous (tickets were free, but guests purchased a $20 concession voucher to reserve a spot), and the wait for snacks was significantly longer than popcorn, soda, and candy. The energy was infectious. It was the most crowded theater I have seen since the Barbenheimer.

It was disappointing. I knew it intellectually stranger things It was a very big thing. Netflix, notoriously opaque but fairly ruthless in pruning shows that don’t meet whatever metrics it shares, has always treated shows that way. the avenger Or star warsRegular PR trumpets all sorts of impressive stats, new episodes crash the service, and cast members and iconography are featured in commercials and brand deals that no other Netflix show gets, Season 4 brought Kate Bush’s “Running Up That Hill” back to the charts, one of the many nostalgia hits the show has kicked off, Even in the murky world of streaming data, it’s clear stranger things It has a large audience and remains a phenomenon, even if later seasons are not the critical darlings of earlier ones. it can be very difficult feel it.

There are several possible reasons for this: the increasingly fragmented Internet, the pervasive and curatorial nature of online fandom, Netflix’s conversation-killing bi-release strategy, and long gaps between seasons that sap any sense of momentum. There is also a show there. analysis of stranger things It’s not that difficult; The show always means more or less what it says. There was no mystery that was proposed that its characters would not solve, there was no context that the show’s creators would not talk about (either themselves or through the show), and its narrative was almost completely unrelated to the world beyond Hawkins, Indiana. Even the Upside Down, the show’s other-dimensional realm of horrors, is so barren and empty that the final season announces its true nature of being not a place but a bridge, connecting our world to the show’s actual home of supernatural horrors. (And another surprisingly barren landscape.)

In practice, this makes stranger things show one that feels Complex, but quite easy to follow. Which makes it something that all types of people will watch together. And maybe even go to an empty mall on New Year’s Eve.

The other weird thing: According to the woman who scanned my ticket, this was the busiest theater she’d seen since Black Friday 2024, the weekend before. gladiator ii And Wicked Both premiered. At the time, he remembers, the theater staff expected 8,000 people a day. This night, they expected a crowd of 1,000 people One Hour,

I saw entire families, many of them in pajamas. Friends young and old. Lots of couples. There were Hellfire Club t-shirts, Demogorgon crowns, and popcorn buckets (pre-purchased from Target). Everyone was taking group selfies, posting pictures or Instagram Reels of how crowded the concession area was. It’s New Year’s Eve, and everyone is playing a ball.

Behind me in the concession line I met a woman named Zia who had come with her daughters. They have been watching together since the first season in 2016 and she loves how exciting the show is, “with a lot of stuff happening.” He told me he was nervous for the finale, “afraid people were going to die.”

Many such things happened. I heard someone say that they thought Dustin was going to die despite Steve’s efforts to save him. In the bathroom just before show time, a teen lamented how long his little brother was taking to wash his hands. “I swear to God,” he said. “If I miss even one minute of this I will commit suicide.”

I met a couple, Adam and Tiffany, who took an hour to get there. Recently engaged and aged in her late 20s and early 30s, she started seeing stranger things Individually, as teenagers, before they started seeing each other. (He said it was season 3; she said it was 4.)

“I love the nostalgia it brings up in me, even though I didn’t grow up in the ’80s,” Adam said. he grew up watching at And foolTherefore he feels attracted to Yug despite his youth. He was also fond of government conspiratorial elements. “It was really prevalent in the first season, with the MK Ultra stuff that was depicted in it. People weren’t aware of it and it was a great way to let people know about it. I really enjoy that attitude from the first season and it continues, especially in the latest season – the government doesn’t always have your best interests in mind.”

Tiffany, for her part, feels that “We’ve really come to know and love all the characters, you know? I’m not going to cry tonight.”

I have to admit that I was constantly surprised by all this. I’ve become accustomed to the asynchronous way in which most modern entertainment is enjoyed and discussed—often apologetically, as everyone contemplates how many shows they’ve seen and can talk about. Sports are the only reliable community experience we get in front of our screens. Television as characters stranger things The experience felt like it was communal, in shared living spaces where screens vied for attention with the world around them. as television stranger things Fans have experienced that it is virtually private, being watched at their convenience on a phone or laptop or TV.

One last weird thing: even for me, A stranger things It was truly incredible to watch the finale in front of a full house of haters. The crowd cheered quickly and repeatedly: when fan favorite Steve Harrington (Joe Keery) is saved from falling to destruction by his rival Jonathan Byers (Charlie Heaton); When newly minted fan-favorite character Derek Turnbow (Jake Connelly) confronts the villainous Vecna ​​with his “Suck my fat!” Gives the finger to. catchphrase; When Eleven (Millie Bobby Brown) stares down the giant, arachnid Mind Flayer in the finale’s climactic battle. When a character is thought to have died, a sniffling sound echoes through the room.

There is an honesty towards stranger things This is in contrast to the skepticism of its marketing and imitators. The Duffer brothers are enthusiastic copycats who are happy to share their crib sheets, but they’re always open about what they want stranger thingsDespite all the incongruous things they’ve stuffed inside it as the show has evolved in every possible way, often hopping pointlessly from one genre to the next, it remains a coming-of-age story about all the ways one can grow up,

This is the show’s secret weapon, the way it’s not just about four D&D-Children at play are growing up, but they have older siblings on the cusp of adulthood or parents who are stuck in bad patterns and need to develop their own. This past season, the show turned into its era, introducing younger siblings who are about to face the same things that the main four did; Taking care of them is the final step towards their maturity.

stranger things‘The constant focus on nostalgia can make it easy to forget the present in which it aired, and what it might have been like to grow up in that time. If you were a kid watching this, you were a kid when Donald Trump was first elected, when Covid-19 ripped the world out from under you, when social media allowed our worst horrors to be delivered straight to your pocket. Your own personal upside.

“Life has been so unfair, so cruel to you,” Jim Hopper (David Harbour) tells his surrogate daughter early in the finale, when Eleven is determined to die in her fight against Vecna ​​because she believes she no longer belongs in this world. He asks her to fight to imagine a life beyond terror. “I know you don’t believe you can have any of this. But I promise you, we’ll find a way to make it real. You’ll find a way to make it real, because you have to. Because you’re worth it.”

It’s a line that collapses the fourth wall, escaping the Hawkins/Upside Down of this 1987 film-based vision and crashing straight into the final moments of 2025. Fans, young and old, with their families and partners and friends, taking selfies, hooting and screaming, haven’t just spent 10 years with characters on TV who feel like friends. They have grown up, and have watched each other grow up through hell. and children, young adults and adults stranger things Have been through hell with them. A ridiculous, nonsensical nightmare parade that has, in some ways, made them unrecognizable from the people they were 10 years ago, the way bookish Nancy Wheeler (Natalia Dyer) has now become a rifle-wielding monster killer.

Are you ending that journey in a theater full of people who have been in the theater with you? What a way to end a year. What a great note to make a fresh start, to go back out into the world with all your fellow fans, to find the right side.