In a new interview with Collider, Hannibal mastermind Bryan Fuller says that America's favorite cannibal may yet make a comeback.

When asked about the possibility of the series making a return, Fuller says:

“The cast is game, I’m game, it’s just a matter of finding the right time where everybody’s schedules sync up, but I would love to continue to tell the story with Hugh Dancy and Mads Mikkelsen. They’re such a fantastic collaborators, and one of the most satisfying actor-showrunner relationships I’ve ever had in this industry. So I would love to continue this story.”

And how, pray tell, would that story continue? According to star Hugh Dancy (who spoke with Collider in January), Fuller's got it all figured out:

“Bryan [Fuller] pitched it to me … well, he, described to me in an overview with what he wanted to do with the 4th season, had there been an interest, and it was really fantastic. It was a complete restart, without describing it — because who knows, God knows, maybe some way we may be able to do it in the future — but it took us back to the first season in a very unexpected way, and made total sense of that cliffhanger ending; it seemed justified. It was born out of a part of one of the books so it was still coming out of that universe, but it wasn’t the Clarice / Silence of the Lambs storyline.”

"Back to the first season in a very unexpected way", huh? I wonder what the angle might be there. Feel free to speculate in the comments below, of course, but before you get too invested in a concept, be aware that we're still a ways off from more Hannibal being a possibility. According to Fuller, resurrecting the series can't even be discussed until 2017.

“Two years after the last airing of the show, we can investigate our options...

August 2017 is when we can actually start talking about it. That’s when we would have to see what the rights are for the character and for the story, and see who’s interested and how we get it done. I have the story, and the cast is excited for the story, so we’re ready to go if somebody wants to go.”

Not long ago I would've told you that hoping for Hannibal to return after being gone for years was a fool's errand. But streaming services (like Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon, which currently owns the streaming rights to Hannibal) really have made just about anything possible. If 2017 rolls around, people's schedules align, and fan interest is still there...who knows? Stranger things have happened.

Fans of NBC’s cancelled-but-not-forgotten series “Hannibal,” about the relationship between FBI special investigator Will Graham (Hugh Dancy) and forensic psychiatrist Dr. Hannibal Lecter (Mads Mikkelsen), continue to clamor for information about the series’ potential continuation. Now, on an episode of the Shock Waves podcast, the hosts interview Fuller and he discusses the series as well as where it could go in the future.

Fuller confirms that he didn’t know the final episode of the third season would be the series finale. (Spoilers for those who have not seen it.) “There weren’t going to be any bodies found floating in that lagoon,” he explained. “And the whole point of showing Gillian Anderson sitting at a table with two additional place settings and her leg on the table was there was a big splash and dinner guests are coming.”

Though the series covered the events in the Thomas Harris novels “Red Dragon” and “Hannibal,” Fuller couldn’t get the rights to his novel “The Silence of the Lambs,” which was tied up in the owners that produced Jonathan Demme’s 1991 feature film. Fuller said that he “still [hopes] that something can be worked out.” “I think the film adaptation is a perfect film,” he says, “but there’s a lot of interesting nooks and crannies to explore in a television series. I hope we get to tell the story.”

Fuller also explained how he and executive producer Martha De Laurentiis have talked about bringing the series back, especially since the rights to “Silence” revert back in August, 2017. “I think, ideally for the cast, it would be as a mini-series, here and there. Let’s do 6 to 8 episodes of that, and 6 to 8 episodes over here. And do it as an irregular thing.”

“Hannibal” is currently available to stream on Amazon Prime and is available for purchase and rental on iTunes. To listen to the full podcast, visit the Blumhouse website.