Half-a-decade (!) on and we’re still waiting on that Hannibal revival. But it’s not a case of creator Bryan Fuller biting off more than he can chew in terms of getting a story together. He revealed in a new interview that trying to make Hannibal season 4 involves navigating a minefield of rights and licensing.
“Martha De Laurentiis controls the rights for the Hannibal character. [Gaumont International Television], who produced the Hannibal series that we worked on, has the rights to those characters and those situations,” Fuller told Collider.
“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.”
Despite the legal hoops that still need to be jumped through, Fuller holds out hope that the network that reheats Hannibal could, hopefully, be Netflix.
“What I love about Netflix platforming the show now is there’s an opportunity for it to be seen as a Netflix show and maybe that will reconfigure their appetite, so to speak,” Fuller said, but warned anyone currently getting their hopes up, “Nobody has said anything to me.”
In slightly more promising news for Hannibal fans who pepper Netflix’s replies with Will Graham fancams (we see you), Fuller said he’s spoken with the main players about what direction a potential season 4 would take.
“I’ve had conversations with Hugh [Dancy] and Mads [Mikkelsen] and the cast, in terms of like, ‘This is what we would do if we were allowed to come back.’ There are some ideas that I’m very excited about that continue the strange trajectory of season 3,” Fuller teased.
But until Fuller gets the go-ahead from the people who control the franchise then, like the cannibal who turned up late for dinner, he’s going to keep being given the cold shoulder.
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