Wednesday season 2 has now wrapped filming, which may sound like good news, but mainly it serves to exemplify just how long it’s taking to get this new season out. Filming may be done, but now we head into post-production, and there is certainly bad news on that front.

Season 1 of Wednesday finished filming on March 30, 2022. The show was not released until November 23, 2022. So, that’s another eight months of post-production work before the show is released, and that will put a likely Wednesday season 2 release date in July 2025, nearly three years after season 1 aired.

It’s a long gap even for the streaming world, and even in mid/post-COVID production. The other Netflix project that is comparable is Stranger Things season 5, but that’s a wildly VFX heavy production compared to Wednesday, which sure, has a disembodied hand and the occasional monster, but is mainly kids running around a school. Filming alone took seven months and no one has been able to figure out why exactly this took so long.

Wednesday season 2 is a hugely important release for Netflix, as it has the most total views of any English language series at 252 million, only behind Squid Game’s 265 million. It is third in total hours viewed behind Squid Game’s 2.2 billion hours, Stranger Things season 4’s 1.8 billion with its own 1.7 billion. Those three series are on their own level well past anything else (fourth place would be Dahmer with 1 billion hours).

One open question is whether or not Netflix is going to split season 2 of Wednesday in half the way it’s done with later seasons of so many other popular shows from Stranger Things to Bridgerton to You, as of late. It may seem like kind of a no-brainer, but Netflix does make exceptions sometimes. Squid Game season 2, for instance, will in fact air all at once. My guess is that Netflix does split it, however, as they do with almost all big English language series, so that would be four episodes one month apart, if they stick with their usual schedule.

The point, as ever, is that Netflix has to get a handle on these insane production times that span years and years. No, they’re not the only streamer dealing with this, but with the amount of shows they have it comes up the most often. This used to be an industry where we got a full ten episode season of Game of Thrones every year. What happened?