Downton Abbey’s Creator Finally Reveals Why It's Ending for Good

Downton Abbey is officially getting its curtain call. Creator Julian Fellowes says the new film, Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale, is the end of the line — not because the well ran dry, but because he does not want to march the Crawleys into the shadow of World War II. Fair enough.

Why this is the last stop

"I did not really want to get into the Nazis and Germany and the lead up to the Second World War. I wanted to leave at a time when that had not yet become apparent as a threat."

That is Fellowes in a new Entertainment Weekly interview, laying out the choice. It is a little bit of inside baseball, but it tracks: moving the franchise into late-30s Europe would shift the whole tone, and apparently he is not interested in turning Downton into a wartime saga.

Where The Grand Finale leaves the family

The film is set in 1930, which Fellowes calls the start of the modern age — the moment when the old upstairs-downstairs world really starts to fade. He wanted to end on a note that shows the characters finding their footing in that change. As he puts it, the era of white tie and footmen was on its way out, so the job here is to make sure the beloved regulars will be okay as the world moves on.

Part of that farewell happened earlier. Violet Crawley got her sendoff in 2022's Downton Abbey: A New Era. Fellowes says they had said goodbye to Maggie Smith's indomitable Dowager Countess, but had not quite said goodbye to everyone else. This film aims to do exactly that.

Quick refresher on the run

• The original series aired on ITV in the UK from 2010 to 2015.
• Three films followed the show: Downton Abbey (2019), Downton Abbey: A New Era (2022), and now Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale.

Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale opens in theaters, wrapping the story on Fellowes's terms — before history turns darker, and while there is still time for one last bow.