On Saturday at San Diego Comic-Con 2019, Seth MacFarlane announced that The Orville is leaving FOX. The show will move to Hulu, becoming a streaming exclusive, beginning with its third season. Could a jump to the big screen be next?
MacFarlane isn’t ruling that out. The Orville came from MacFarlane’s love of Star Trek, a television franchise that grew to also include a film series. During The Orville panel at Comic-Con, a fan asked MacFarlane if The Orville could go in the same direction. MacFarlane says he hopes the series lasts long enough for them to start considering films.
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“If we don’t get sued,” MacFarlane said, joking about the similarities between The Orville and Star Trek. “We always hope we will go long enough to see if we can do a film or two but we’ll see. It’s a possibility.”
The Orville earned its first Emmy Awards nomination this year. It’s nominated in the Outstanding Visual Effects category for the episode “Identity, Part 2”. What’s impressive is that The Orville is the only nominee in the category from a traditional broadcast network. The others are either from premium cable networks (Game of Thrones) or streaming services (Star Trek: Discovery, The Man in the High Castle, The Umbrella Academy).
That means The Orville was likely working with a fraction of the budget available to those other shows. That pressure to stretch the budget as The Orville evolves to encompass scenes like the space battle in “Identity, Part 2” may be why the show is jumping to Hulu. If the series continues to up its visual game that way, it won’t be long before a jump to film seems natural.
“The Orville has been a labor of love for me, and there are two companies which have supported that vision in a big way: 20th Century Fox Television, where I’ve had a deal since the start of my career, and FOX Broadcasting Company, now FOX Entertainment, which has been my broadcast home for over 20 years. My friends at the network understood what I was trying to do with this series, and they’ve done a spectacular job of marketing, launching and programming it for these past two seasons. But as the show has evolved and become more ambitious production-wise, I determined that I would not be able to deliver episodes until 2020, which would be challenging for the network. So we began to discuss how best to support the third season in a way that worked for the show. It’s exactly this kind of willingness to accommodate a show’s creative needs that’s made me want to stick around for so long. I am hugely indebted to Charlie Collier and FOX Entertainment for their generosity and look forward to developing future projects there. And to my new friends at Hulu, I look forward to our new partnership exploring the galaxy together,” said MacFarlane of the move to Hulu in a press release.
Would you like to see an Orville movie? Let us know in the comments. The Orville Season Three premiers on Hulu in 2020.
