Back in 2015, just two days after the final episode of Hannibal Season 3 aired, creator Bryan Fuller gave the show a “less than 50/50” chance to return.
“But if the audience is still there for the show and still wants a continuation of that story, I’ll continue looking for ways to give it to them,” Fuller told Empire.
Two years later, the fans are still here and enough of the rights issues have been cleared that a Hannibal Season 4 looks more and more likely. Hannibal’s executive producer Martha De Laurentiis as much as confirmed the series’ planned return, tweeting a photo of her, Fuller and a Hannibal Lecter doll:
Meeting of the minds @BryanFuller #Fannibals pic.twitter.com/WtUSEcPm0y
— Martha De Laurentiis (@neoprod) August 13, 2017
Fuller followed up with more details, writing, “Conversations couldn’t start until two years after the final airing of Season 3. [De Laurentiis] has started those conversations. This takes time.”
His estimate? With eight months to a year of preproduction and another eight months to a year to bring Season 4 to air, Fuller predicted the Hannibal Season 4 premiere date is “at earliest 4-5 years away.” That means 2021 or 2022.
“We’ll need patience,” Fuller said.
Still, Fuller sounds optimistic that a Hannibal Season 4 will actually happen, even offering to deliver Blu-rays across the veil between death and life for fans who die during the long vigil:
I WILL ENTER THE ASTRAL PLANE WITH BLU-RAYS FOR YOU TO WATCH IN 4K
— Bryan Fuller (@BryanFuller) August 15, 2017
Over its three seasons, Hannibal followed the evolving relationship between serial killing psychiatrist Hannibal Lecter (Mads Mikkelsen) and FBI profiler Will Graham (Hugh Dancy). While Hannibal began as a serial killer procedural, with Lecter advising the FBI on case-of-the-week murders, it soon evolved into one of the lush, experimental, graphic and sex-charged shows on network television, loosely retelling stories from the Thomas Harris novels Red Dragon and Hannibal, layered with sensuality and homoerotic subtext in the charged relationship between its titular killer and the man working to bring him to justice. At the end of Season 3, Lecter and Graham plummet off a cliff in each other’s arms, neither willing to fully betray or abandon their bloody friendship.
While the story for Season 4 has yet to be developed, Fuller has previously indicated that it would follow the events of Silence of the Lambs, introducing FBI agent Clarice Starling, Harris’ second most famous creation after Hannibal “The Cannibal” Lecter himself. According to Empire, Fuller had at one point conceived Hannibal Season 4 as a six to eight episode storyline that he described as “ Inception meets Angel Heart.”
