"Stranger Things" actress: Each episode of the fifth season is so long that it's equivalent to shooting 8 movies

Although there's still some time until Stranger Things Season 5 airs, fans can at least look forward to the upside-down madness that the show will bring when it returns.

Star Maya Hawke (daughter of Ethan Hawke), who has played Robin Buckley on the hit Netflix series since season three, recently spoke to the Podcrushed podcast to give a brief update on the fifth and final season of Stranger Things.

She joked that the show was "a bit cursed" having been delayed in the past by the coronavirus pandemic and writers and actors' strikes, but another culprit for the long wait for season five was the sheer scale of its production.

“We’re basically doing eight movies, and each one is very long,” Hawke said on the podcast.

She also detailed the creative process, saying series creators brothers Matt and Ross Duffy "took a lot of responsibility" in the script.

"They have a great writing team, but they're also very involved themselves. They write a lot and are very strict and serious about the quality of the sequel scripts, so it takes a long time to write and shoot each season."

Hawke's comments echo previous statements made by executive producer and regular series director Shawn Levy, who told Total Film last September that Stranger Things season 5 is "going to be as big as any big-budget movie we've ever seen."

Hawke and Levy's comments carry weight given the length of some of the fourth season's episodes. The episodes vary in length, but all are at least an hour long, with the shortest being just 63 minutes. The longest, the super-sized season finale, is nearly two and a half hours long. The nine-episode season totals about 13 hours.

The showrunners haven't specified whether season five will be of a similar length, but Hawke's comments certainly make it seem like it will be.