Bryan Fuller Already Has Hannibal’s Revival Season Mapped Out — Down to the Last Course

Hannibal refuses to stay dead. Every few months someone asks Bryan Fuller or Mads Mikkelsen if that fourth season is ever going to happen, and Fuller just gave the clearest update yet: he knows exactly what season 4 is, a bunch of the cast wants back in, and the only real villain right now is a tangle of rights paperwork.

So, what would season 4 feel like?

Fuller was blunt on the Horror Queers podcast: if you loved season 3, you are his target audience. He admitted season 1 skewed too procedural for his taste, felt better about season 2, and believes season 3 is the show fully dialed in. The planned revival follows that trajectory.

'I know exactly what season 4 of Hannibal is... If you are not down with season 3, then you are not going to be grooving on the plan for season 4 because it is following that arc.'

Who is in, who was there, who made it

• Ready to return (per Fuller): Hugh Dancy, Mads Mikkelsen, Laurence Fishburne, Katharine Isabelle, Caroline Dhavernas, Lara Jean Chorostecki, Aaron Abrams, and Scott Thompson.
• The original ensemble also featured: Hettienne Park and Gillian Anderson.
• The core dynamic of the series: Will Graham (Dancy), an FBI special investigator with a gift for profiling, and Dr. Hannibal Lecter (Mikkelsen), a brilliant forensic psychiatrist who becomes both Will's most dangerous adversary and the one person who truly understands him.
• Behind the scenes: Fuller executive produced with Martha De Laurentiis, Sidonie Dumas, Christophe Riandee, Katie O'Connell, Elisa Roth, Sara Colleton, David Slade, Chris Brancato, Jesse Alexander, Michael Rymer, and Steve Lightfoot. Among the writers were Nick Antosca (Channel Zero) and Don Mancini (Child's Play/Chucky).

The rights maze (aka why this is taking forever)

Here is the not-fun part. After Martha De Laurentiis passed away, the rights situation got more complicated. Pieces of the Hannibal rights are in flux: some are reverting to novelist Thomas Harris, and some are held by MGM/Amazon. Fuller says the stakeholders are working through it, but the process is now trickier than before. He keeps checking in and trying to rally everyone to land at a new home for season 4.

A Clarice curveball

Fuller has also said he wants to tackle The Silence of the Lambs under the Hannibal umbrella, and he even floated Zendaya as his pick for Clarice Starling. That is a swing, and I would watch the internet lose its mind in real time.

Quick refresher

NBC canceled Hannibal after three seasons back in 2015. It was a network show that steadily shed its 'murder-of-the-week' skin and morphed into something stranger, sleeker, and more operatic. Fuller is promising more of that flavor if season 4 happens.

If season 3 was your jam, Fuller is basically handing you a menu for season 4. If season 3 was not your thing, he is also warning you now.