GoKawiilThe parking lot was packed. That’s the first Strange Thing.
A little background. Just about every mall is struggling now, but the Neshaminy Mall in Bensalem, Pennsylvania is more or less comatose. As Defector’s Dan McQuade, a lifelong Pennsylvanian and mall fan, wrote in his fond remembrance of the shopping center, the once bustling complex is mostly a shuttered ghost town, with half of it set to be demolished. There are only two real reasons to go there: a well-stocked Barnes & Noble and the AMC movie theater.
And people do go there for the movie theater. It’s one of only three theaters in the Philly area with an IMAX screen, making it a destination for fans of prestige formats. I’m there often in my job as a critic, and I’m used to the IMAX auditorium being a full house. The parking lot outside of the theater at 8PM on New Year’s Eve, the night it’s showing Stranger Things 5: The Finale, however, was on another level. The concession line was overwhelming (tickets were free, but to reserve a spot guests bought a $20 concession voucher), and waits for snacks more involved than popcorn, soda, and candy were substantial. The energy was infectious. It was the most crowded I’ve seen a theater since Barbenheimer.
This was disconcerting. I knew, intellectually, that Stranger Things was a big deal. Netflix, notoriously opaque but quite ruthless in pruning shows that do not meet whatever metrics it does not share, has always treated the show like its Avengers or Star Wars. Regular PR blasts trumpet all manner of impressive stats, new episodes cause the service to crash, and the cast and iconography show up in ads and brand deals that no other Netflix show gets. Season 4 put Kate Bush’s “Running Up That Hill” back on the charts, one of many nostalgic hits the show has brought roaring back. Even in the dodgy world of streaming data, it’s clear Stranger Things has a big audience and remains a phenomenon even if later seasons are not the critical darlings the first was. It can be much harder to feel this.
There are many potential reasons: an increasingly fractured internet, the diffuse and curatorial nature of online fandom, Netflix’s conversation-killing binge-release strategy, and long gaps between seasons that snuffed out any sense of momentum. There’s also the show itself. Analyzing Stranger Things is not that difficult; the show has always more or less just meant what it said. There was no mystery it proposed that its characters wouldn’t solve, no reference that the show’s creators wouldn’t talk about (either themselves or through the show), and its narrative was almost entirely unconcerned with 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 declares its true nature to be a bridge and not a place, linking our world to the actual home of the show’s supernatural horrors. (And another surprisingly barren landscape.)
In practice, this makes Stranger Things a show that feels complex, but is quite easy to follow. Which also makes it the sort of thing all kinds of people would watch together. And maybe even drive out to a dead mall for on New Year’s Eve.
Image: Netflix
The second Strange Thing: According to the woman who scanned my ticket, this was the busiest she had seen this theater since Black Friday 2024, the weekend Gladiator II and Wicked both premiered. Back then, she remembers being told that theater staff expected 8,000 people for the day. On this night, they expected a crowd of 1,000 people to turn up over one hour.
I saw entire families, many in pajamas. Friends young and old. Lots of couples. There were Hellfire Club T-shirts, Demogorgon crowns and popcorn buckets (purchased in advance, from Target). Everyone was taking group selfies, posting photos or Instagram Reels of how crowded the concession area was. It’s New Year’s Eve, and everyone is having a ball.
Behind me in the concession line I met a woman named Gia who came with her daughters. They had been watching together since the first season in 2016 and love that the show’s exciting, “with lots of things happening.” They told me that they were nervous for the finale, “scared that people will die.”
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