The Futurama Season 14 finale streams today on Hulu, and Variety reports there are no further plans at the moment for the animated comedy to return as a regular series. The show is not finished, though: three supersized Hulu specials are still to come, starting in 2027.
Creator Matt Groening does not expect this to be the end. “They can put us in a coffin. They can nail the lid shut, but they can’t bury us. We will rise again,” he told Variety. “I guess I’m not too worried.”
A Finale Titled To Be Final
The season closer is titled “Final Ending: The Last Conclusion,” and its logline reads: “Fry and his brother sneak into a PG-13 movie as kids … with shocking consequences for the future.” Groening said the title is a joke about how often the show has been declared over. “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,” he said. “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.”
Executive producer David X. Cohen, who developed the series with Groening, said on “The Making Of” podcast that the episode 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.” Cohen said he likes those episodes “to leave the audience thinking that there’s beautiful things ahead for these characters, whether or not we get to see them.”
Three XXXL-Sized Specials Are In Production
Hulu greenlit the three extended episodes, billed as “XXXL-sized” specials, and revealed them in July during the show’s Saturday panel in Ballroom 20 as part of Disney’s San Diego Comic-Con lineup. The specials are currently in production, and the first will be Christmas themed and is expected in 2027.
“The people at Hulu/Disney were saying, ‘Hey, give us some big stories that we can promote,’ and we said, ‘Gotcha,'” Groening said. “So these three that are coming up are kind of epic stories, and they’re promotable.” He added that it is fun to “tell a bigger story, but also take the time to breathe a little bit.”
Robot Santa, the violent version of St. Nick who has made occasional visits to Futurama since Season 2, will play a role in the holiday special. Groening would not say what the other two specials cover, only that “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.”
If Futurama does not come back after the specials, Groening said, “we’ll do something else,” adding, “I love the group of people that work on this. It’s just a blast to work together.”
A Disenchantment Crossover Before The End
Season 14’s penultimate episode, “A New New York Yankee in King Elfo’s Court,” crossed Futurama over with Disenchantment, which Groening made for Netflix for five seasons. Groening said Futurama’s cast, its animation studio and many of its writers also worked on that show. “That was a very nimble negotiation to have Disney and Netflix working together,” he said.
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