Hannibal season 4: Producer blames piracy for the show's cancellation

'With more than two million watching our show illegally, it’s hard not to think online pirates were partly responsible'

Hannibal, Sky Living (Sky Living)

Unfortunately, even with well over 50,000 fans having put their name to a petition asking NBC to order a fourth series of Hannibal, it isn’t looking very likely.

So who is to blame? After all, the series was critically well received and has an excitable fan base of many thousands.

Executive producer Martha De Laurentiis has said that at least part of the blame falls on online pirates - those who download the show illegally.

"When NBC decided not to renew Hannibal for a fourth season - a show on which I served as executive producer - it wasn’t much of a leap to connect its fate with the fact that the show was ranked as the fifth-most illegally downloaded show in 2013," wrote De Laurentiis in an open letter for The Hill.

"Did pirates kill Hannibal? Unfortunately, that is a cliffhanger that might last for a while. With more than two million viewers watching our show illegally, it’s hard not to think online pirates were, at the very least, partly responsible for hundreds of crew members losing their jobs and millions of fans — who watched the show legitimately — mourning the loss of a beloved program."

While this makes sense - that if those two million people had watched the show legally it would still be on the air - it may not actually hold true. Why? Because many of the most illegally downloaded shows in the world are still going very strong, Game of Thrones being the obvious example.

In actuality, Hannibal hasn’t been illegally downloaded that much in the past year. According to TorrentFreak, last year it didn’t fall in the top ten illegally downloaded shows, falling behind the likes of The Walking Dead, Big Bang Theory, The Flash, Mr. Robot and Suits.