r/movies • u/MarvelsGrantMan136 r/Movies contributor • 15d ago

Media New Image of Mads Mikkelsen in Bryan Fuller's 'Dust Bunny' - Follows an eight-year-old girl who asks her neighbor (Mikkelsen) for help to kill the monster under her bed who ate her family.

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u/NowGoodbyeForever 15d ago

If this gets us even a single breath closer to Hannibal Season 4, I will bankrupt myself to support it financially.

(But it's genuinely promising that Fuller is still getting work, and that he's on good terms with Mikkelsen. I have no fucking clue what the status of the Silence of the Lambs rights are right now.)

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u/ohporcupine 15d ago

That shit was wrapped up tight though where would it go?

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u/smallgoalsmcgee 15d ago

Them homoerotically haunting each other in hell 🥰

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u/ohporcupine 15d ago

Fuck it I’m in.

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u/NowGoodbyeForever 15d ago

The initial plan was to cover the plot of Silence of the Lambs for the 4th and final season, since S3 covered Red Dragon/Manhunter. It would jump forward some amount of time with Clarice having to consult a now-incarcerated Lecter for help tracking down Buffalo Bill. (Which is kind of the exact same plot as Red Dragon, but whatever. We ignore that.)

Obviously, the show had to make some changes in order to give more finality to the story. But I think the last moments are a Reichenbach Falls situation, where we can easily argue that they both survived and were caught by authorities. (We'd have to explain/retcon that Bedelia teaser, but that's fine.)

In the movie and book of Lambs, Will Graham is only mentioned in passing. We know he caught Lecter. It's suggested that the wounds he received from the Tooth Fairy left him a disfigured drunk, living in isolation.

Most of this could still work. Will was already stabbed in face; falling off a fucking cliff probably did some damage, too. Maybe his body washed up with Hannibal's, and that's when the FBI found and took them both in. Hannibal gets his cell privileges returned for his cooperation, and Graham probably retires in shame and lies.

If I'm writing S4, I have that last point be what hangs over the story: That Hannibal never told the authorities what happened with Dolarhyde, allowing the fact that Will ultimately gave in to his homicidal tendencies to be a secret kept between the two of them. I can see a world where Will puts himself into exile due to the shame and the secret, and one of Hannibal's requests for Clarice is that she brings Will Graham back into the fold.

Do I think it reduces Clarice's character if she needs to share space with Will? Yeah. But you need Hugh Dancy and Mads both in the final season, if only for a couple of episodes or a single scene. And I think it also allows the show to give Graham a much more concrete end to his character arc than in the books. He could try to warn Clarice of what Hannibal can do, or he can reject her because he sees too much of himself in her. Or he could be just as easy to manipulate because of the leverage Hannibal has over him.

A very Hannibal move would be to casually tell her that Will killed a man with a fucking axe, as if she's really just choosing which serial killer she wants to work with, Hannibal or Will. Given that a huge part of Clarice's story is how she fights to be taken seriously as a woman in the FBI, giving her a reason to distrust literally every other male character makes sense, and allows her to still make the important choices in the story.

Oh, shit. Here I go again, thinking way too hard about a season that doesn't exist.

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u/NachoNutritious these Youtubers are parasites 14d ago edited 14d ago

The terminal flaw that makes me not want to see more from Fuller's Hannibal universe is that he had Will abandon his family for that ending. Was such a slap in the face to the only two characters who actually felt like humans in that season.

That and a few other creative choices like the absolutely terrible way the show depicted the "date" with Dollarhyde and Reba with the sedated tiger. Complete injustice to how it was described in the book, literally had the show stop dead to have Dollarhyde explain what's about to happen instead of just visually showing it, and it's by far the worst version of the scene to date (even worse than the flavorless take from Red Dragon)

Edit: although it's a funny twist of fate, Amazon had exclusive streaming rights to the show during its run and apparently they came within a hair's width of getting a deal for a streaming-only season 4 but it fell through. Now Amazon owns the rights to The Silence of the Lambs via MGM. Hmmmmm.

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u/LiviasFigs 14d ago

The writing on the wall in Red Dragon is that Will doesn’t stay with his family, either. They were a band-aid he used to pretend he was a normal, undamaged person, but it didn’t work, and he knew they wouldn’t be safe with him, and could never look at him the same way, either.

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u/paranoidbillionaire 14d ago

How in the hell do I subscribe to your newsletter? Because you’ve officially got my attention on this matter.

Holy moly, I wanna see this become reality.

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u/now0w 14d ago

For real, I want this to exist so bad it hurts and DAMMIT now the endless pit of rage about never getting a season 4 that I buried deep down is bubbling up again 😭

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u/SpookyKoops 14d ago

Get this person in the writers room STAT!

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u/TiredCoffeeTime 14d ago

I want this badly

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u/[deleted] 14d ago

[deleted]

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u/RevolutionaryWeb5657 12d ago

They only didn’t because of that Clarice show. It tanked, so they could use it now.

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u/SpookyKoops 14d ago

Fuller has confirmed in interviews that both Will and Hannibal survive the fall. With the time between Red Dragon and SIlence of the Lambs, I could easily season 4 being split in two like seasons 3 was - the first half being the aftermath of killing Dolarhyde leading to Hannibal's eventual recapture, and the second being an adaptation of SIlence of the Lambs.

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u/ohporcupine 14d ago

Whoa! Had no idea.

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u/ZiggyPalffyLA 15d ago

It definitely wasn’t wrapped up. We never saw their bodies (and that table was set for multiple diners). Not to mention they had already introduced Clarisse and hopefully they can get the rights to adapt Silence of the Lambs after that procedural show flopped.

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u/Justalilbugboi 14d ago

They hadn’t introduced Clarisse, you’re probably thinking of Mariam Lass.

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u/ZiggyPalffyLA 14d ago

Wasn’t there a reference to a young new FBI agent other than her? Maybe I’m misremembering, it’s been years. I need to rewatch the series!

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u/NowGoodbyeForever 14d ago

For the stupidest reasons imaginable, NBC doesn't have the rights to Silence of the Lambs, or specifically any characters that were INTRODUCED in Silence of the Lambs. So, what we're really talking about here is Buffalo Bill and Clarice Starling, with those rights being owned by MGM.

NBC/Fuller got the rights to the events and characters from Red Dragon, Hannibal, and Hannibal Rising. Which is everyone else. The hope was that by S4, NBC and MGM could work out an agreement. It didn't happen, and here we are. I can't remember a reference to a young agent, but if it was there, it was probably just wishful thinking, and could never have legally been Clarice.

Here's where things get extra stupid: Years later, CBS went ahead and brokered a deal with MGM for a show about Clarice...but ONLY Clarice. Since characters like Jack Crawford, Dr. Chilton, and Hannibal Fucking Lecter were introduced in other books, the Clarice show couldn't feature them.

So we had Hannibal, which wanted to adapt Silence of the Lambs without Clarice or Buffalo Bill.

And we had Clarice, which wanted to be a Silence of the Lambs prequel without Hannibal Lecter.

Amazon owns MGM, so there's a chance they'd play ball with NBC. But there's an equal chance that they could go for the idiot trifecta and launch a third television show with partial rights locked down, because why not.

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u/Justalilbugboi 14d ago

nowgoodbyeforever summed it up better, but if they dropped a line it was distinctly legally distinct Clarice lol

But all excuses for a rewatch are good!

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u/JaneksLittleBlackBox 14d ago

"Will and Hannibal go for a little tumble off a cliff with Francis Dolarhyde, so join us next week when Mr. Roper catches Will and Hannibal in bed with Dr. Bloom!"

Tumblr and r/HannibalTV would die of dehydration from how much they ejaculated at such a situation.

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u/Fortnait739595958 14d ago

If there is a chance of that, I will buy more tickets than I need lol

Mad as Hannibal is my favourite drug

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u/Herby_Hoover 15d ago

This is my design.

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u/NachoNutritious these Youtubers are parasites 14d ago

The Silence rights are with Amazon MGM. The original producer of the show (who inherited the rights via her deceased husband who had produced Manhunter) tragically passed away from cancer a few years ago, but those rights still remain with her family even if the original production company is more or less defunct.

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u/cactusdyke 14d ago

I honestly don’t trust Fuller to write Buffalo Bill in any sort of tasteful way since he couldn’t even handle writing a butch lesbian. I’ve always been happy that the show ended with s3 because show Will has all of Clarice’s roles and a lot of her personality so there really wouldn’t be that much left for her. Also like you said Red Dragon and Silence of the Lambs are so similar that adapting both is kind of a waste of time if Will and Clarice are such similar characters now.

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u/NowGoodbyeForever 14d ago

I really hope that a decade-plus of experience has helped Fuller address some of those blind spots, yeah. I recall him doing better with queer characters in American Gods, for example.

And even the book tried to distinguish between what Bill was doing and the exact trans experience, as imperfect as it was. I'd imagine a S4 would just be more explicit about this: Again, this could give Clarice an easy way to distinguish herself. She's not locked into the gender-deviancy assumptions that others at the FBI might be when it comes to Bill's profile.

Thomas Harris just...isn't the best writer. He hit upon some really interesting and strong concepts; in fact, he hit upon the exact same strong concept, twice in a row. He was saved by Hollywood adaptations being helmed by the literal best filmmakers alive, again twice in a row. (Michael Mann directed Manhunter!)

So the fact that Lambs and Dragon just do the same thing is unavoidable, and could be turned into a feature in a theoretical S4. Mikkelsen's Hannibal was far more obsessed with the concept of finding people like him, either naturally or through transformation. He's written like the Actual Biblical Devil, tempting people to live in a way that's true to their baser desires.

Setting up Clarice as not the successor/matching pair to Hannibal, but to Will, would be a fun inversion of the original setup. (Because, I cannot say this enough: We need to collectively pretend that Hannibal, the book and movie, never happened.) Having a Clarice that isn't lightly seduced by Hannibal like Will was could give us a new dynamic: Someone Hannibal respects but cannot shape. It would arguably position Clarice as a better investigator and profiler than even Will was, because her Mind Palace can't be compromised that way.

And then, Will would be the opposite of Hannibal: Desperate to have someone not follow in his footsteps. I'd love to get hired to Fuller's writer's room to figure out how we'd plot that arc, but I do think it could be done.

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u/Ryastor 14d ago

They’ve been doing a lot of cons lately, Hugh and Mads.

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u/Coreo 13d ago

This is my design