Why Hannibal Creator Bryan Fuller Refuses To Give Up On A Fourth Season

It's more than a decade since "Hannibal" ended with a jaw-dropping cliffhanger that had us wishing there were things we had gotten to see, but series creator Bryan Fuller still holds out hope that Dr. Hannibal Lecter (Mads Mikkelsen) and Detective Will Graham (Hugh Dancy) could return for a fourth season of the criminally underrated (and criminally insane) series.

"Everybody wants to return," Fuller said on a horror podcast. "Hugh, and Mads, definitely. But also Lawrence Fishburne, Katie Isabelle, Caroline Dhavernas, Lara Jean Chorostecki, Aaron Abrams, and Scott [Thompson] all want to come back to the story."

Getting the band back together is one thing, but the death of Martha de Laurentiis, who produced the "Hannibal" and "Red Dragon" films along with the TV series based on the same source material, has made ownership of the rights murky. "The rights are in the process of reversion to Thomas Harris [author of the Hannibal Lecter novels]," Fuller says. "MGM/Amazon has some. They're all being navigated in a way that is going to be a little trickier to iron out now. They're in process, and I keep on touching base and trying to encourage folks to get back together."

Fuller's reasons for still wanting the show to come back stem from his frustrations with Season 1, and the untapped potential of his ambitious third season. 

"I was frustrated with Season 1," he told the podcast. "That felt a little more like traditional television to me. There was a lot more 'murder mystery of the week' crime procedural kind of things ... I thought Season 2 was better. Season 3, I was like, 'Okay, this is what we should be doing. This is what I want to be doing. This is the type of storytelling that I think the show can do. And there are a lot of people who don't like Season 3, and I was like, 'Well then, you really don't want a Season 4, because that's it.'"

While the actual mechanics of bringing "Hannibal" back are still to be determined, Fuller knows exactly what he would want a fourth season of the series to look like.

"My dream project is to do a limited series of 'Silence of the Lambs' with Mads and Zendaya as Clarice Starling," Fuller told ScreenRant in 2025. "If I could put anything out into the universe, I would put that into the universe."

Adapting "The Silence of the Lambs" might actually simplify the rights issue, since the TV studio Gaumont, which produced the "Hannibal" series, wouldn't need to be involved. That would allow Mads Mikkelsen to return without the baggage of yet another studio rights holder. "You can't copyright a performance, you know?" Fuller said cheekily. "So there are things that we're trying to figure out if we can get away with that would make it an easier path, that might shake the possibilities loose of things that we might be hindered from doing at this point, given the status of the rights."

Watching Zendaya's Clarice face off against Mikkelsen's Hannibal might just be a twisted nightmare for now, but if Fuller keeps pushing, maybe that nightmare will come to life.