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"Hannibal" ended on a literal cliffhanger when it was cancelled by NBC in 2015, and although creator Bryan Fuller refuses to give up on a fourth season, Hannibal Lecter (Mads Mikkelsen) and Will Graham (Hugh Dancy) still haven't returned to our screens. The show was axed due to low viewership, despite having a cult following. But one of the producers on "Hannibal" thinks the truth behind its untimely end is more complicated.
"It wasn't much of a leap to connect its fate with the fact that the show was ranked as the fifth-most illegally downloaded show in 2013," producer Martha De Laurentiis wrote for The Hill in 2016. "When nearly one-third of the audience for 'Hannibal' is coming from pirated sites — despite the fact that a legitimate download for each episode was available the following day — you don't have to know calculus to do the math."
De Laurentiis' logic is sound. If those who had pirated "Hannibal" had watched it on NBC or downloaded it legally, there's a good chance that the horror TV show could have continued. However, another glaring problem for the franchise's continuation is how its rights are fractured across multiple studios.
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Bryan Fuller wants to cast Zendaya as Clarice Starling for Hannibal Season 4
In 2026, Bryan Fuller told Screen Rant that the author of the Hannibal books, Thomas Harris, is trying to get all the rights back "underneath the same umbrella." Perhaps unsurprisingly, Fuller already knows what he wants to do for Season 4 if Harris succeeds in his quest to reassemble the rights like one of the show's grisly murder tableaus.
A year earlier he also told the outlet: "My dream project is to do a limited series of Silence of the Lambs with Mads [Mikkelsen] and Zendaya as Clarice Starling. If I could put anything out into the universe, I would put that into the universe."
If it ever happens, Zendaya would be the fourth actor to play Clarice Starling. Jodie Foster and Julianne Moore played the FBI agent in "The Silence of the Lambs" and "Hannibal" respectively on the big screen, while Rebecca Breeds led the short-lived CBS series, "Clarice." Today, Zendaya is one of Hollywood's most in-demand stars, one who could definitely hold her own against Mads Mikkelsen's magnetic Hannibal Lecter.
For "Hannibal" fans looking for some more grisly horror to binge, here are are 10 horror shows without a single bad season.
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