If you happened to stumble across the Hannibal fandom on Twitter for the first time on Tuesday morning, you’d be forgiven for thinking that a cult was preparing for something ominous. The Fannibals were celebrating an ending of sorts, tweeting “#22MonthsAreOver” en masse. Cult leader… erm, we mean Hannibal showrunner Bryan Fuller responded in kind, writing “See you on the other side!”
Culty and weird, yes, but that’s par for the course with the Hannibal fandom at this point. In fact, fans and showrunner alike were celebrating the possibility that the series might, finally, return to our screens.
It feels like forever since Dr. Lecter enjoyed his last meal. The sumptuous horror story and cannibal-meets-FBI-special-agent Gothic romance aired the final episode of its third season back in August of 2015, after low ratings led NBC not to renew it for a fourth. Fans wasted no time launching an enthusiastic campaign to save the show before the actors’ contracts expired, but expire they did.
Finding a new home for the critically-acclaimed series had hit a snag. Amazon held exclusive streaming rights in the U.S. “Ask again in 22 months!” Fuller told a fan in October of 2015, when asked if there was any hope.
And, exactly 22 months later, the fans asked. True to his word, Fuller answered.
“Conversations couldn’t start until 2 years after the final airing of season 3,” Fuller tweeted on Tuesday. “[Producer Martha De Laurentiis] has started those conversations. This takes time.”
Excuse us while we scream excitedly in the corner for a moment.
Okay, perhaps the screaming is premature. No, we won’t have a new episode next week, as great as that would be. “We are talking,” Fuller clarified Thursday. “This will take a couple of years to land.”
Still, you can’t blame us fans for being excited. It’s been a long two years, and we’re exquisitely hungry. So, to satiate our hunger while we wait, let’s recap what we know so far about the potential fourth season of Hannibal.
First and foremost, we know the cast and crew are just as eager as the fans for a resurrection. Fuller’s eyes light up if you ask him about Hannibal Season Four, a devilish grin creeping across his face. He’s currently hard at work crafting the second season of Starz’s stunning American Gods with co-showrunner Michael Green, but he’s made it clear more times than we can count that he wants his cannibal back.
He’s also apparently told Hannibal stars Mads Mikkelsen (Hannibal Lecter) and Hugh Dancy (Will Graham) his idea for Season Four, and says they’re keen.
What exactly he told them remains shrouded in mystery, but Fuller has teased a few delectable details. At New York’s Split Screens Festival earlier this year, he hinted that the season would be a conceptual mashup of Christopher Nolan’s mind-bending Inception and Alan Parker’s psychological horror film Angel Heart. Tickle us intrigued…
In one of his few concrete answers, he also revealed the food theme for the fourth season’s episode titles: Cuban. Fans have speculated that the season would see the “murder husbands” escape to the Caribbean island after drying off from their little cliff-diving expedition.
While the boys are off putting meat back on the menu, Margot Verger (Katharine Isabelle) might be doing the quite the opposite at her dearly departed brother’s meatpacking plants. In Mick Garris’ Post Mortem podcast, Fuller expressed his desire to see “Margot Verger taking down the meat industry as a hot, powerful lesbian.”
Meanwhile, dust your best skin-suit off and get excited, because it’s looking more and more likely that a retelling of The Silence Of The Lambs might be in the cards, after all. There’s a rights issue to contend with there as well, but on Blumhouse’s Shock Waves podcast last year, Fuller expressed his admiration for Demme’s film and his hope to explore the “interesting nooks and crannies” of the story, potentially in miniseries format.
Of course, Hannibal Season Four isn’t a certainty by any means. We’ll just have to wait and see, but the wheels are starting to turn. As Hopkins’ Lecter once told Clarice, “All good things to those who wait.”
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