Fans of psychological horror-thriller series and films aren’t facing any shortages on what to watch, but very few shows have captivated audiences like the sickeningly sweet splatterfest and kaleidoscope of the bizarre that is Bryan Fuller’s Hannibal. Inspired by Thomas Harris’ Hannibal Lecter novels, the show follows troubled FBI profiler Will Graham (Hugh Dancy), who forms an unlikely bond with forensic psychiatrist Hannibal Lecter (Mads Mikkelsen). Unfortunately for Will and his slipping sanity, Hannibal also happens to be a cannibalistic serial killer.
The series was a critical darling and major awards-magnet, but viewership dropped off after three seasons and NBC canceled it. It was an upsetting end for Hannibal’s dedicated fanbase, but that hasn’t prevented the community, the creator, and the series’ stars from vocally hoping Will and Hannibal might appear on silver screens again. With the 10th anniversary of season 3’s finale coming up at the end of August, though, is it already too late for Hannibal season 4?
Shortly after the finale concluded, Fuller summed up to TVLine what it would take to stop him from fighting for a Hannibal revival: “It’s not over until I’m dead, as far as I’m concerned.” With that in mind, I’m not giving up either — despite the seemingly never-ending barriers the series faces. Given the gut-churning ending of season 3, it’s hard not to want to know what happens next.
[Ed. note: Spoilers ahead for the finale of Hannibal season 3.]
Ever since Hannibal’s 2015 finale, “The Wrath of the Lamb,” concluded with Will and Hannibal falling off a cliff into the dark ocean below, fans have been asking “What now?” For some viewers, Hannibal ended right then and there. Will had finally embraced both his joy for killing, in the murder of Francis Dolarhyde (Richard Armitage), and his undeniably romantic feelings for Hannibal. Unfortunately for Will and Hannibal both, Will came to a shocking conclusion: “Can’t live with him, can’t live without him.” So throwing himself into the sea with Hannibal in his arms, effectively ending a life of killing and finding enjoyment in it before it even began, seemed like the best way to go.
I’m a huge Hannibal fan myself, and I found that conclusion more than just enjoyable — it completely fit the relationship Fuller and his writers built up between Will and Hannibal across three seasons. Metaphorically speaking, while Hannibal would often reach out to embrace Will with one hand, he also had a knife in the other. Will leaning into this dynamic and adapting it for himself meant the two were never going to have a stable relationship, even though they acknowledge they’ve never been so well “known” or “seen” by anyone else.
And while a life with Hannibal would have been emotionally fulfilling for Will, who often struggled to fit into the role society expected of him as a man, husband, and father, it would come at the cost of everyone else in his orbit, including old friends like psychiatrist-turned-murderer Alana Bloom (Caroline Dhavernas) and head of the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit, Jack Crawford (Laurence Fishburne). There was only one path left to tread: death.
On the other hand, Hannibal’s finale includes an after-credits scene with Dr. Bedelia du Maurier, Hannibal’s psychiatrist and on-again-off-again lover, portrayed by the wonderful and dynamic Gillian Anderson, sitting at a dinner table. The camera pans to show two other chairs at the table, and two place settings alongside her own. The meal for the evening? Bedelia’s own severed leg. The series ends there, with Fuller explaining to Vulture that the scene was meant to represent one of two readings: Either Lady Murasaki or Uncle Robertus (two of Hannibal’s pseudo-relatives in Harris’ book Hannibal Rising) had gone down the list of Hannibal’s enemies and picked Bedelia to serve up as a treat, or Hannibal himself might have survived the fall. With a teaser like that, it’s no wonder some fans are eager to see more.
But is it too late? Throughout the years, the pendulum on whether we’ll ever see Hannibal season 4 has swung back and forth. Bryan Fuller, Hannibal’s showrunner and creator, has never stopped expressing his love for the TV series, often showing off fan art and articles featuring the show’s characters via his Instagram account. He, Mads Mikkelsen, and Hugh Dancy have all expressed their desire for Hannibal to return.
Mikkelsen is booked and busy in roles across TV, film, and even video games, but he spoke to Business Insider in 2024 about the series returning one day. “[Hannibal has] got to happen eventually, sooner than later, because we’re not getting any younger, right? But the story itself can jump, it can have that gap, which is fine. So it’s all about finding a home for it, but that’s nothing concrete out there now.” Dancy, a series regular on NBC’s 2022 revival of the original Law & Order, is also down to return. Speaking to Collider in 2023, he said, “We keep saying, when we get asked, ‘Oh, we’d love to do it,’ which is true. Maybe it’ll take one of us to say, ‘I will absolutely never do a fourth season of Hannibal,’ but that would be a lie.”
But regardless of the cast’s adamant affection for the series, a TV reboot isn’t made from love alone. Dancy himself acknowledged to Collider that creating a season of TV isn’t cheap. “I’m talking about the cost of making a season of television. For a while, it seemed like the streamers were gonna be everybody’s savior in that respect, but now there’s been a cutoff there. There are shows that are watched by millions of people that don’t make it past a second season. So I have no idea what that calculation is.”
Then there’s the fact that the rights to various Hannibal characters from Harris’ novels are actually divided between three different owners. The De Laurentiis Company owns the rights to Hannibal Lecter. This came about after Dino De Laurentiis snatched up the rights to Thomas Harris’ 1981 novel Red Dragon, and produced an adaptation: Michael Mann’s 1986 film Manhunter. That movie didn’t do so well, but De Laurentiis still retained the rights over Hannibal Lecter, as well as several others who appeared in the film, such as Jack Crawford and Will Graham.
As Fuller himself explained in a 2020 interview with Collider, Gaumont International Television owns the rights to the rest of the characters in the forms they have in the Hannibal television show, such as Alana Bloom, ragebait journalist Freddie Lounds (Lara Jean Chorostecki), etc. While Alana Bloom and Freddie Lounds both appeared in Red Dragon, they were both men with wildly different stories and arcs than they have on the show, so much so that the Hannibal versions are legally considered different characters.
Then there’s Thomas Harris, who owns the rights to any character who originated in his 1999 and 2006 novels, Hannibal and Hannibal Rising, such as Margot and Mason Verger. For Hannibal to return, all these entities, plus whatever new network or streaming platform the show appeared on, it would need to cooperate on the rights issues. That isn’t impossible, but it’s a knotty problem.
I personally hope it can all be worked out. One of the biggest missing pieces in the NBC seasons of Hannibal was the lack of Clarice Starling, the key player in the Hannibal Lecter novels, portrayed by Jodie Foster in Jonathan Demme’s 1991 Harris adaptation The Silence of the Lambs. As The Wrap explained in 2021, Clarice is missing from Hannibal because the rights to Harris’ books are split between the De Laurentiis Company and MGM, which bought out Orion, the original production company and distributor of The Silence of the Lambs, and thus has the rights to Clarice and several other characters included in that film.
Laurentiis, having seen Manhunter perform badly, lent Orion the rights to use Hannibal for free. The company quickly changed its tune when Silence did so well. These rights issues have severely affected not just Fuller’s potential Hannibal season 4, which Fuller had hoped would include Clarice, but Alex Kurtzman’s 2021 CBS series Clarice, which couldn’t mention Hannibal Lecter at all because of Hannibal first appearing in Red Dragon, and was canceled by default, having nowhere to go after rights negotiations failed.
Speaking to Collider in 2020, Fuller pointed to the rights issue and the need for network support as the biggest roadblocks to a Hannibal revival. “Martha De Laurentiis controls the rights for the Hannibal character. So if we want to continue telling the tales we were telling, Gaumont needs to be involved, Martha De Laurentiis needs to be involved. Then of course we need a network to platform us.”
Fuller has said Martha De Laurentiis supported his plan for a fourth season of the show — he considered her an ally in his hunt to revive the series.
“I’ve knocked on every door and rang every bell,” he told Collider. “Martha and I, every couple of years, pick up our bags and go door to door and see if anybody’s interested in revisiting. The biggest hurdle is that we were somebody else’s show.” Another hurdle: Martha De Laurentiis’ 2021 death left the rights issues back in murky waters.
And yet, even with the 10th anniversary of the show’s finale arriving soon, hope hasn’t dimmed completely. The series’ cult following is still thriving. Its active subreddit is on Reddit’s top 2% communities list. Fans are still producing a ridiculously large amount of fanfiction around the show, with more than 45,000 individual works logged on Archive of Our Own as of this writing. It even has its own convention: Red Dragon, named after Harris’ novel, launched in 2015. The 2025 edition of the con brought back main cast members Hugh Dancy and Lara Jean Chorostecki; Mads Mikkelsen and Caroline Dhavernas attended in 2024.
The latest update on a possible season 4 came this year at Emerald Comic-Con 2025, where Mikkelsen and Dancy reunited to discuss the series and its future, and where season 4 might take up the story. “It’s just a question of how much we jump [forward] in time,” Mikkelsen said. “Because if we do a jump of six or seven years — it can be very interesting, what these guys are doing now. So I don’t want to see an ending, I want to see a fresh start.”
A fresh start isn’t entirely out of the question. Even if Fuller doesn’t get the opportunity to use Clarice, there’s plenty left to explore in Hannibal’s setting, particularly in knowing that Fuller’s plans for season 4 involved an even more intimate look into Will and Hannibal’s relationship, as well as fleshing out the relationship between wives Margot Verger (Katharine Isabelle) and Alana Bloom. We’re also living in an age of nostalgia, where studios assume reboots and revivals are nearly guaranteed to have baked-in audiences from the get-go, and so will boost them heads and shoulders above new content. (Just look at Dexter: Resurrection, the most-streamed premiere in Showtime’s history.)
Dexter and other recent series revivals, like David Lynch’s Twin Peaks: The Return didn’t necessarily face the kinds of rights issues Hannibal is facing. But still, the thought of a Hannibal season 4 remains delicious to ponder, in spite of the legal roadblocks — and the practical ones. As Hugh Dancy himself put it to Collider, the actors are getting older. “We may literally just age out of it, and the people online will start to say, ‘Well, actually, that might be slightly gross,” he said.
I highly doubt the dedicated Hannibal audience would care as much as he thinks they would. An older Hannibal and Will would mean a time-skip, sure. But that comes with its own interesting premise: What could a twisted love story like Hannibal and Will’s grow into in a world where they survived and are older and wiser? One of the key themes I love about this show is the idea of being seen by someone in a way that outsiders are simply unable to comprehend. Will, facing mental and physical health struggles as early as season 1, can’t help but be drawn in by Hannibal’s manipulations, because Hannibal sees the darkness inside him, recognizes it as similar to his own, and calls out to it. Despite wanting to do good, to be good, Will can’t resist falling into Hannibal’s orbit. Now that the two men have committed murder together, what does this mean for their relationship? Will they kill again, or will Will push Hannibal to exercise restraint?
Yet Will and Hannibal’s gothic love story isn’t the only thing I’d adore to see developed. Margot Verger and Alana Bloom, fondly known as the “Murder Wives” to Will and Hannibal’s “Murder Husbands,” are just as huge a part of the story to explore. Season 3 touched on their relationship, with Alana falling for Margot while helping Margot’s sadistic brother capture Hannibal and bring him to justice. The two went on to marry and have a child together — the child’s life only being possible due to Hannibal covering up Margot and Alana’s murder of Mason. Hannibal has promised to take that child from Alana as soon as he’s able to.
Will previously had a friendship and romantic entanglement with Alana, so what would that mean for their dynamic in season 4? Would it be enough to prevent Hannibal from murdering Alana? These unanswered questions will probably haunt me for the rest of my life — or until Hannibal season 4 finally happens, in whatever form it takes. If Fuller hasn’t given up on seeing it happen, then why should I?
