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“Futurama” Reportedly Ending Again After Three Extended Specials With Matt Groening Holding Hope For…
# **“Futurama” Reportedly Ending Again After Three Extended Specials With Matt Groening Holding Hope For A Renewal**. **“We Will Rise Again!”**.
**“Futurama”** likely is ending again as Disney Television Studios currently has no plans to return with regular episodes after the three extended specials which will be the series twelfth season in production order.
But given how often the Matt Groening animated comedy has wrapped — only to be revived again and again — it’s hard for anyone involved, including Groening, to assume that this time it’s really done.
“They can put us in a coffin. They can nail the lid shut, but they can’t bury us. We will rise again, I guess I’m not too worried. The thing about is Futurama coming to an end?’ Well, we’ve come to an end many times before. We make a joke about it with the season finale. It’s redundantly, fatalistically titled. I think we have a whistling-past-the-graveyard attitude these days because we’ve been in this situation many times before. We have lots more stories to tell. The animators and the actors and the writers all would love to do more stories and we’ll see. You never know. What happens if, after the three upcoming specials, “Futurama” really doesn’t come back? “If it doesn’t happen, we’ll do something else,” Groening said. “I love the group of people that work on this. It’s just a blast to work together. In fact, the cast of ‘Futurama’ and the animation studio and many of the writers also worked on ‘Disenchantment,’ which I did with Netflix for five seasons.” - **Matt Groening**
“When we were writing this season finale, from our point of view, it could have been the series finale and that is a situation that we have been in probably more than any other show in history. The one that’s going to be on shortly is our sixth series finale, in the sense again that at the time we wrote it might be, and we are now currently working on the seventh series finale. I feel like we’ve gotten pretty good at it. In my mind, if we go off the air, the characters are still having their adventures and interesting things are still happening And I like to leave the audience thinking that there’s beautiful things ahead for these characters, whether or not we get to see them. That’s sort of the guiding philosophy for these series finales we’ve written.“ - **David X. Cohen**
In the meantime, “Futurama” marches on with those three specials (dubbed “XXXL-Sized”) first announced at this summer’s San Diego Comic-Con. Those extended episodes, which are currently in production, will kick off in 2027 with a Christmas-related installment. The specials will be Season 12 in production order.
“The people at Hulu/Disney were saying, ‘Hey, give us some big stories that we can promote,’ and we said, ‘Gotcha, So these three that are coming up are kind of epic stories, and they’re promotable. The nature of these stories, in general for ‘Futurama’ and also ‘The Simpsons,’ is that each episode could be a movie. I mean, we pack enough melodrama and shenanigans in every episode to stretch it out. It’s just fun to tell a bigger story, but also take the time to breathe a little bit. Because one of the things that animated shows are bedeviled by is a short running time. We’ve been on the air forever, since 1999, so there’s more to the overall arc of the story of the characters. Stuff that we have hinted at from the very beginning is finally paid off, and some unanswered questions for true fans will finally be answered. But I can’t really be more specific. If you ask me again in a year, then I can talk about it.” - **Matt Groening**
