Matt Groening Vows 'Futurama' Will Rise Again After Sixth Finale

"Futurama" ended its 14th season Monday on Hulu with an episode titled "Final Ending: The Last Conclusion" — the sixth time the show has been written as a potential series finale.

There are no further plans at the moment for the animated comedy to return as a regular series. Three supersized Hulu specials, dubbed "XXXL-Sized" and first announced at this summer's San Diego Comic-Con, are currently in production and will kick off in 2027 with a Christmas-related installment.

Creator Matt Groening is not treating the latest ending as definitive.

"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."

The show has a long history of false endings. "Futurama" premiered on Fox in 1999 and ended its run there in 2003. Comedy Central revived it in 2008 and wrapped it up in 2013. It returned again in 2023 via Hulu. Each time the series appeared to be over, the producers prepared an episode that could double as a finale — only for the show to come back.

"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."

Monday's finale is an origins/flashback story. According to the logline: "Fry and his brother sneak into a PG-13 movie as kids … with shocking consequences for the future."

On "The Making Of" podcast, executive producer David X. Cohen — who developed the series with Groening — put the math on the show's serial resurrections.

"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 said. "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."

The upcoming "XXXL" trilogy gives the producers that seventh stab at a series finale. Cohen described the philosophy behind those endings.

"In my mind, if we go off the air, the characters are still having their adventures and interesting things are still happening," Cohen said. "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."

Groening said the three specials took shape after a push from the streamer. "The people at Hulu/Disney were saying, 'Hey, give us some big stories that we can promote,' and we said, 'Gotcha,'" he said. "So these three that are coming up are kind of epic stories, and they're promotable."

Longer formats suit the material, he argued. "The nature of these stories, in general for 'Futurama' and also 'The Simpsons,' is that each episode could be a movie," Groening said. "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."

Groening confirmed the 2027 Christmas special — "Xmas," in the show's parlance — will feature Robot Santa, the violent St. Nick who has menaced the series since Season 2. The character drew resistance early on.

"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 in good fun!"

He stayed quiet on the other two specials, but hinted at payoffs for long-term viewers. "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."

Season 14's penultimate episode, "A New New York Yankee in King Elfo's Court," delivered a "Futurama"/"Disenchantment" crossover — no small feat given that one series streams on Hulu and the other ran on Netflix, where Groening made five seasons. "That was a very nimble negotiation to have Disney and Netflix working together," he said.

If "Futurama" truly ends after the specials, Groening has a fallback. "If it doesn't happen, we'll do something else," he 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.'"

"Futurama" stars John DiMaggio, Billy West, Katey Sagal, Tress MacNeille, Maurice LaMarche, Lauren Tom, Phil LaMarr and David Herman. Groening created the series with Cohen; Groening, Cohen, Ken Keeler and Claudia Katz serve as executive producers. The series is produced by 20th Television Animation, part of Disney Television Studios, with animation from Rough Draft Studios.

With six finales behind it and a seventh already in production, "Futurama" enters 2027 having turned cancellation itself into a running joke — one its creators clearly expect to keep telling.