Last year’s cancellation of the television series Hannibal, starring Mads Mikkelsen as the famed cannibal Hannibal Lecter and Hugh Dancy as FBI agent Will Graham, upset many people. I reviewed all of Hannibal’s final season and was upset at its cancellation, even if its finale did offer as much closure as it possibly could.
Since its conclusion, various actors and crew involved in the show have spoken up about when they might be able to do a continuation of some kind and showrunner Bryan Fuller has just stated when might be a good time for discussions to start up again.
At the Saturn Awards, Fuller told Collider “August 2017 is when we can actually start talking about it. That’s when we would have to see what the rights are for the character and for the story and see who’s interested and how we get it done. I have the story, and the cast is excited for the story, so we’re ready to go if somebody wants to go.”
Fuller also added that everyone in the cast is eager to continue in some form. “The cast is game, I’m game. It’s just a matter of finding the right time where everybody’s schedules sync up, but I would love to continue to tell the story with Hugh Dancy and Mads Mikkelsen. They’re such a fantastic collaborators and one of the most satisfying actor-showrunner relationships I’ve ever had in this industry. So I would love to continue this story.”
Currently Mikkelsen will be seen later this year in Doctor Strange and Rogue One: A Star Wars Story while Hugh Dancy has been starring in The Path and will appear in Fifty Shades Darker. A few months ago Dancy even teased what the fourth season would be about, saying “Bryan pitched it to me. Well, he, described to me in an overview with what he wanted to do with the fourth season, had there been an interest, and it was really fantastic. It was a complete restart, without describing it — because who knows, God knows, maybe some way we may be able to do it in the future — but it took us back to the first season in a very unexpected way, and made total sense of that cliffhanger ending; it seemed justified. It was born out of a part of one of the books so it was still coming out of that universe, but it wasn’t the Clarice/Silence of the Lambs storyline.”
Its not surprising to hear that 2017 is the soonest possible time for any talk of Hannibal’s revival. Aside from Mikkelsen and Dancy’s schedules, Fuller has his hands full showrunning the upcoming American Gods and new Star Trek series. One aspect that will surely be discussed if any attempt at a revival is to happen is how the share a new season as executive producer Martha De Laurentiis believes pirating effectively killed the show. In an open letter, she wrote “When nearly one-third of the audience for Hannibal is coming from pirated sites — despite the fact that a legitimate download for each episode was available the following day — you don’t have to know calculus to do the math. If a show is stolen, it makes it difficult, if not impossible, to fairly compensate a crew and keep a series in production.” Hopefully they won’t have that same problem for a potential new season.
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Originally published June 24, 2016. Updated April 15, 2018.
