Bryan Fuller Would Like To Make A Fourth Season Of Hannibal
Hollywood is currently addicted to the exploitation of pre-existing properties, and that obsession is generating a lot of inferior products that will be forgotten quickly. In the right hands, however, an IP can transfer from movies to television flawlessly and stand up in its own right. This happened with Bryan Fuller’s Hannibal, a prequel to the various movies focused around Anthony Hopkins’ cannibal creepazoid.
NBC kept Fuller on a pretty loose leash, and he was allowed to make his Hannibal series as gruesome and gory as you’d imagine a show about a cannibal to be. This, however, turned off a significant chunk of the mainstream audience big networks need to survive. NBC was nice enough to give Hannibal three seasons, but had to cut it loose eventually.
But was that truly the end? It’s been a couple of years since any episodes were in production, so people assumed so, but Bryan still has hope that Hannibal will find a new home, and he hasn’t given up. Speaking as a special guest on the horror podcast Post Mortem With Mick Garris, he said:
“I have conversations with [producer] Martha De Laurentiis. I have conversations with Mads [Mikkelsen] and Hugh [Dancy]; we’re all excited about the prospect of returning to the story. There’re some hurdles to get through. The rights revert back to Martha in September, I believe, and then it’s a matter of: do we do it with [previous production company] Gaumont? Which would be the only way to do it if we wanted to use those characters.”
Fuller said he already knows what he wants to do for a season four of Hannibal, if it ever happens. And he gave a few hints.
“There’s a whole storyline that I want to do with Katharine Isabelle’s character, Margot Verger, who now is the mother of the Verger heir and in control of the Verger meatpacking industry. I wanted her to humanize all the Verger meatpacking plants and turn them over to PETA-approved [authority]. That would definitely be marbled through the season, Margot Verger taking down the meat industry as a hot, powerful lesbian.”
Could Hannibal ever return for another season? These days, it seems like anything can go back into production; a new season of Twin Peaks just began after all. Fuller won’t be able to relaunch the series tomorrow, however — he’s currently hard at work on the pay-cable series American Gods.