Fourth season
The footage of the latest installments of the Netflix series exceeds an hour
Regardless of the vicissitudes that the protagonists face in the fourth season, if the new ‘Stranger Things’ is surprising for something, it is because of the announced duration of its chapters. Where are the times when the series offered short episodes so that the user could consume several at once and the writers were not forced to put filler plots? The approximately 40-minute footage was one of the hallmarks of platform productions compared to those broadcast on free-to-air channels (which used to lengthen them beyond an hour to retain the audience).
All this has changed. More and more series are aiming to stretch their deliveries (especially the pilot chapters). Although it has been ‘Stranger Things’ that has thrown the house out the window. The first episode of the fourth season reaches the hour and 16 minutes. The second, fourth, fifth and sixth last the same, minute up, minute down. The shortest of this batch is the third (1 hour and three minutes). The seventh and eighth extend to 98 and 85 minutes respectively. And the ninth is not cut and adds two and a half hours. It should be remembered that this season will not be released in its entirety, since the platform has decided to divide it by volumes. The first seven episodes will arrive on Netflix on May 27, while the other two will be presented on July 1.
Was there so much left to tell about the saga for these footage to be accurate? It’s possible. Although the logical thing is to think that Netflix wants to make the investment it has made in this title profitable, which continues to be one of the most successful in its catalog. The budget per chapter is 30 million. An atrocity. Serve as a comparison that 15 million were allocated to each of the last of ‘Game of thrones’.
Eleven, in one frame.
Apart from what was invested in this blockbuster, there is another reason why the bulky footage is convenient for the company: its new audience measurement system. And I say “its” because there is no independent auditor that measures the success of the platforms, but rather they are the ones that cook their own data. Therefore, they should always be viewed with reservations. Until now they measured the popularity of a series according to the accounts that
they had watched at least two minutes of each movie or episode. Given the criticism of this system (it must be recognized that two minutes is not very relevant), the company announced a new classification based on the total number of hours accumulated per subscriber.
Once this change in criteria occurred, Netflix made its first ranking, which led the movie ‘Red Notice’ with 149 million hours. As for the series ‘Narcos: Mexico’, with 50 million hours of viewing, and ‘The Squid Game’, with 43 million hours, they were the most successful.
The new system is favored by the hours that fans are likely to dedicate to the new plots devised by the Duffer brothers. Because ‘Stranger Things’ continues to be one of the series events, despite the wear of the title and the fact that other options have emerged in the competition to catch the more familiar audience.
The first volume of the fourth season of ‘Stranger Things’ will be available on Netflix on May 27.
#episodes #Stranger #long