Hannibal & the Rights Issue
After reading the notes on this post by @whatshehassaid, I thought people might like a quick quick-as-I-can-manage explanation of the rights on Hannibal, how they work, and what Bryan is probably thinking wrt moving ahead on Hannibal in 2017 (I’ve bolded sections for tl;dr skimming).
The Dino de Laurentiis Co (Martha de Laurentiis) owns the rights to all characters originating in Red Dragon. This includes: Hannibal, Will, Jack, Alana, Freddie, Chilton, Beverly, Price, Zeller, Molly, Willy (Walter), Francis, Reba, Hobbs, the Leedses, the Jacobis, and various and sundries.
MGM owns the rights to all the characters originating in The Silence of the Lambs. This includes: Clarice Starling, Ardelia Mapp, Jame Gumb (Buffalo Bill), Senator Ruth Martin, Barney Matthews, Paul Krendler, Catherine Martin, and various and sundries.
Thomas Harris owns the rights to characters originating in Hannibal and Hannibal Rising. He rents these out for a fee, apparently whenever Martha wants. This includes Margot and Mason Verger, Chiyoh, Mischa Lecter, Rinaldo Pazzi & Wife, Evelda Drumgo, Cordell, Carlo & Matteo, Lady Murasaki, Robert Lecter, and various and sundries.
Before Hannibal was produced, Gaumont got in a bidding war with MGM to acquire the production rights for the Red Dragon characters from DLC. MGM was looking to do a TV series based on Clarice Starling and wanted Hannibal Lecter, etc., while Gaumont’s international television division was just getting started and was needing to make a splash as Hugh might say.
Gaumont won the rights. This is why MGM has been stingy wrt Clarice Starling et al ever since. This was a loss for them–they had the chance to marry all the characters under one company, including Will and Hannibal and Clarice and Jack and Chilton and everybody, and they lost it. This could be part of why the Starling show never got off the ground. When Bryan’s people had asked them for the rights to Clarice (one would assume in some kind of lease), they would have been giving up something to a competitor that had already beat them out once. As time passed and the Clarice Starling TV project got lost in preproduction limbo, Bryan said that MGM started warming up to the idea of dealing on Clarice, though they still did not ink a deal. This was after Season 2. The intent was to go into a “full court press” for her character after Season 3 (and possibly Bryan was willing to extend that another year, given that he took the end of S3 in a direction away from SOTL, and initially he said that doing SOTL after the end of S3 would not make sense). There may have been some feelers out for Clarice Starling during S3 production, but the “full court press” never occurred because the show didn’t get renewed.
Gaumont’s television division is an independent production studio, meaning they needed to sell the show to a broadcast, cable or streaming network in order to fund the show and make a profit. In the US, this was NBC; elsewhere it was Sony/AXN, SkyLiving, CityTV, etc. (This is why all the @nbchannibal contests were US only, as they didn’t have rights to do jack shit in other territories.)
Amazon Prime acquired exclusive VOD (video on demand) rights to Hannibal in a package deal, along with with four other NBCUniversal shows, for a period of four years. From the first season’s first episode? The first season’s last episode? The last season’s last episode? No one knows. The first air date of Hannibal was April 4, 2013; “Savoureux” aired on June 20, 2013. The final air date of Hannibal was August 29, 2015.
After three episodes of the third season aired, NBC did not renew Hannibal for a fourth season. It did not “cancel” it, as Gaumont is an independent company and could have continued the show as long as it found funding through distribution. But when NBC did not renew Hannibal, Sony/AXN pulled out, and when they pulled out, the vast majority of the funding was lost.
When contracts expired on June 30, 2015, the show was starting more or less from scratch again. They needed to get a distributor: without that, there would be no show. Then they would have to rebuild contracts with all the primaries from scratch. What got in the way was the VOD license for Amazon: Netflix was willing to bid, but they didn’t want to pay for new seasons if they couldn’t stream old seasons which would be held in their competitor’s hands; likewise, Amazon didn’t want to sell to their competitor and didn’t want to make new seasons itself. Thus Amazon’s VOD rights halted the show from continuing.
“Ask again in 22 months!”
Be forewarned: this is pretty much conjecture from this point on.
On September 28, 2015, Katie O’Connell was ousted from her role as president of Gaumont International, which had restructured as Gaumont TV. Katie O’Connell was the executive whose fortuitous meeting with Bryan Fuller on an airplane was what had yielded Hannibal in the first place, when he pitched her the idea of the relationship between Hannibal Lecter and Will Graham and how they were “just alike,” and how the story of Hannibal as a practicing psychiatrist had never been told.
Very shortly after, on October 8, 2015, Bryan first tweeted that we should “Ask again in 22 months!” This put our new date into August of 2017. Since we already knew that Amazon had held up the production and would have their VOD rights until sometime in 2017, the collective understanding of his statement in the fandom was that this was when Amazon’s streaming rights would expire (correlated to the last air date of the last season).
In light of @whatshehassaid posted (”[Bryan] said that they have to wait two years from the last air date until Martha gets the rights back and then they are going to go to MGM”), it’s more likely that what they’re really waiting for is Gaumont’s right to produce the show to expire.
Gaumont always produced Hannibal on a shoestring budget. Bryan mentioned a handful of times that one of the reasons the third season was so nightmarish to film was because Gaumont promised them one budget and then tried to reduce it. I’m theorizing that the restructuring of Gaumont was part of what caused the show’s problems in the first place and that it probably fed into Bryan’s statement that there was no way they could meet the production schedule that Amazon required. When Katie O’Connell, Bryan’s advocate, was defenestrated, then the desire to continue to work with Gaumont also got defenestrated, thus spawning the idea to pursue MGM for Clarice Starling and SOTL.
This is important because it completely changes the nature of the prospective deal with MGM from what it was when the show was being produced by Gaumont. Before, they went to MGM to ask for the right to take (buy) Clarice Starling from them. Now, they would be going to MGM to give (sell) Hannibal Lecter to them.
That deal is a lot sweeter. Or could be, with the right incentives.
Probably financially–the major difference between starting a new series from scratch and starting Hannibal over is that Hannibal already has a fanbase and critical acclaim–but perhaps more importantly than that, bringing the rest of the Harrisverse back to MGM would allow MGM to save face after getting outbid by Gaumont. The incentive that MGM had to refuse–Gaumont’s involvement–has been taken away.
This is not really news (the situation with Gaumont has been something we’ve discussed before) but it does clarify the situation and what it is we’re waiting for.
Is all this better, worse or the same?
Who knows. The MGM plan is probably the likeliest way that the show has of getting produced again, and if it doesn’t pan out, they can always shop to other studios, as long as they have interest from Netflix or another network to invest in and distribute the show. Nothing was happening on the Gaumont front anyway, so waiting is probably the same as them not waiting. While I suppose it may have been possible to produce the show and hold release till 2017 when Amazon lost streaming rights, I kind of doubt that was ever going to be a financial decision that would have made sense to anyone, or it would have materialized last summer, when Netflix was first pursuing the show. Amazon’s streaming rights issues will be resolved at about the same time as the Gaumont thing, so it does make sense to just wait till then and then make the best play or plays they can.
In the end, our job remains the same. We need to continue to pursue Netflix, Hulu, Starz and whoever else is on our list to make sure that they know that there still is audience demand for more Hannibal. MGM will never pick it up if there isn’t money to be made. I know it gets tedious to keep doing the same calls and chats and emails over and over, but get involved and stay involved anyway.
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Give Bryan his baby back, give Mads his dream role back, give Hugh his favorite character back. It may be hard because we’re the most out of the loop of information, but we’re the most important players in making this happen.
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