A $25 million goodbye to Stranger Things

And just like that, the Upside Down is Rightside Up.

Stranger Things, the show that arguably made Netflix into what it is today–that is, an entity capable of absorbing Warner Bros. Discovery–is officially over. And for its last hurrah? It brought movie theaters a cash injection of $25-28 million, people familiar with the matter told Variety.

Stranger Things‘ long-awaited final episode concluded the Hawkins gang’s fraught battle against ubervillain Vecna, and it premiered a whopping nine years and six months after the show’s first season dropped on Netflix. Plenty of smart people have talked about the issues with stretching out Stranger‘s production for so many years with such a young cast, so we’ll leave that to them.

Instead, we’ll talk about one pro of the Duffer Brothers taking almost a decade to finish Netflix’s flagship: In that time, our digital media industry has grown to such heights that it can command equal ground with Hollywood.

Netflix, hungry for Oscars, began releasing its films into theaters in 2017/2018, and its productions have commanded theater space ever since, and won a number of Academy Awards. It’s also worth mentioning that independent creators, mostly YouTubers, have similarly successfully pursued theater distribution for their projects. We’ve covered that numerous times, and now are just a couple weeks from seeing Markiplier‘s Iron Lung adaptation debut on over 2,000 screens across the U.S., with its own custom popcorn bucket at Regal.

With all that in mind, it’s no surprise Netflix decided to put Stranger Things‘ two-hour series finale on the big screen.

And we’re also not surprised that, despite Season 5’s somewhat lukewarm reception, at least one million people got their butt in a seat for the send-off.

The data here is a little tricky. Netflix showed the episode in ~600 theaters, a large portion of which were owned by AMC

. But Netflix’s arrangement with theaters didn’t involve selling the usual sort of tickets. Instead of box office-style buy-ins, where viewers pay for the right to attend and revenue is split between the production studio and the theater, fans reserved their places to Stranger‘s finale by buying concessions vouchers directly from theaters.

That means all the cash from their attendance went to the theater–not to Netflix.

It was a smart move for two reasons:

1. If someone is willing to make the trip to a physical theater to see the episode, they’re probably a Netflix subscriber–so they’ve technically already paid for the right to see it, and by having them just pay for concessions, Netflix is avoiding double-charging them.
2. It’s street cred with theaters. Netflix has some bad blood with big chains because it demands a shockingly short window between theater viewing and home viewing. By not taking a chunk of theaters’ revenue, Netflix might get into their good graces–which it’ll need, when it’s in charge of Warner Bros.

As for how much theaters earned off the finale in total, it’s hard to be exact, since different theaters charged different prices for their concession vouchers. AMC and Cinemark both charged $20, while Regal and some others charged $11 to honor Stranger‘s bloody-nosed Millie Bobby Brown.

Only AMC got specific: It told Variety it generated $15 million from ~753,000 vouchers.

The Duffer Brothers said 1.1 million vouchers sold across all theaters–so, depending on the mix of voucher prices, the total falls somewhere between $25 and $28 million for two days of showings, per Variety‘s sources.

That’ll do, Stranger Things. That’ll do.