Matt Groening on the Future of ‘Futurama’ as the Series Gets Another Finale: ‘We Will Rise Again’ (EXCLUSIVE)

As the long-running animated series wraps its Season 14 Monday on Hulu, there are no further plans at the moment for it to return as a regular series. (However, three supersized Hulu specials are still to come).

But given how often the Matt Groening animated comedy has wrapped — only to be rebooted again a few years later — 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,” Groening told Variety. “I guess I’m not too worried.”

“Futurama” first premiered on Fox in 1999 but ended its run there in 2003. Comedy Central revived it in 2008 and wrapped the show up in 2013. It returned again in 2023 via Hulu.

Each time the show went away, or it looked like the series was ending, the producers prepared an episode that could double as a series finale — only for the show to later come back. That’s why the producers had some fun with the episodic name for the year’s latest “finale.” Monday’s episode — the “Futurama” Season 14 ender — was given the title “Final Ending: The Last Conclusion.” The episode is a bit of an origins/flashback story; here’s the logline: “Fry and his brother sneak into a PG-13 movie as kids … with shocking consequences for the future.”

And yes, this could always double as a regular series finale. But don’t bet on it.

“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,” Groening said. “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.”

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 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.”

“The nature of these stories, in general for ‘Futurama’ and also ‘The Simpsons,’ is that each episode could be a movie,” he added. “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.”

Beyond the extended Christmas installment, Groening won’t share what the other two specials are about just yet, only to note that “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.”

But he did share more on the Christmas (or in “Futurama” parlance, “Xmas”) edition: Robot Santa, the violent version of St. Nick who has made occasional visits on “Futurama” since Season 2, will play a role.

“Our version of Christmas, of course, is with Robot Santa,” Groening said. “Which back in the day was very controversial, because our robot Santa thought he was Santa — but he thought everyone was naughty, so he would go around trying to kill everyone. That was not considered in the Christmas spirit. At first there was some talk about not running the shows. It was controversial. But now everybody has figured out, hey, it’s all it’s all in good fun!”

On a recent episode of “The Making Of” podcast, exec producer David X. Cohen, who developed “Futurama” with Groening, noted that “Final Ending: The Last Conclusion” is the sixth time the show has been written as a potential series finale and now the upcoming “XXXL” trilogy also means they’ve been given a seventh stab at a “series finale.”

“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,” Cohen told the podcast. “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,” Cohen added. “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.”

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.”

That’s why Season 14’s penultimate episode, “A New New York Yankee in King Elfo’s Court,” featured a “Futurama”/”Disenchantment” crossover episode. Bringing together a Netflix and Hulu series wasn’t easy. “That was a very nimble negotiation to have Disney and Netflix working together,” he said.

“Futurama” stars John DiMaggio, Billy West, Katey Sagal, Tress MacNeille, Maurice LaMarche, Lauren Tom, Phil LaMarr and David Herman. Groening created the series, which he developed with David X. Cohen. Groening, Cohen, Ken Keeler and Claudia Katz are EPs; the series is produced by 20th Television Animation, a part of Disney Television Studios. Animation comes from Rough Draft Studios.