The Bizarre Fox Meeting That Led To Four Entire Futurama Movies
The tenure of "Futurama" has always been a bumpy road filled with cancellations and studio meddling, yet it's also gotten its share of good luck over the years. Most notable was Comedy Central's decision in 2007 to greenlight four DVD movies for the show, which had been canceled for nearly four years by that point. The movies were "Bender's Big Score," "The Beast With a Billion Backs," "Bender's Game," and "Into the Wild Green Yonder," released between March 2008 to August 2009. Not only did they function as films, but they were also split into four episodes each and were aired on Comedy Central as basically a 16-episode season. (That's how it's displayed on Hulu as well.)
Although these movies were meant to stand on their own, with Comedy Central not having any concrete plans to continue the show long-term, their success ended up leading to the official return of "Futurama" in 2010 and helped pave the way for yet another return with the newest season on Hulu. "Futurama" is now (technically, depending on how you count it) one of the longest-running animated sitcoms of all time, and a lot of that is thanks to the success of those DVD movies.
But how did the "Futurama" creators get four movies in the first place? The far more popular "The Simpsons" only ever managed to make one, after all. On paper, four movies within two years feels like a big ask, not just for the writers but for the audience who are used to the show in a non-serialized format. The answer, it turns out, has a lot to do with the idea that it's almost always better to buy things in bulk. The more movies the studio ordered, the cheaper they could get each of them produced.
From one to four
Describing the meeting with Comedy Central in the DVD commentary for "Bender's Big Score," co-creator David X Cohen explained how he and co-creator Matt Groening came in expecting to just do one movie, only for the studio heads to quickly tell them it'd be more "economically viable" to do two. "So then the discussion went back and forth and we said, like, 'Well, if we're doing two, we can actually do it more efficiently if we do three,'" Cohen said. "And they said, 'Okay.' And we said, 'In fact, if we did four, that would be one percent more efficient even.'"
By this point, the studio heads seemed to realize they'd just negotiated their way into a whole season's worth of "Futurama" material; what must've been intended as an easy, low-commitment way to profit off of the show's pre-existing fanbase had now turned into something much bigger. As Groening recalled, "All I remember is we said four and they said, 'Okay, fine, four, but that's it, stop!'"
And so, "Futurama" fans got four movies, the last of which ("Into the Wild Green Yonder") could've easily served as the series finale if Comedy Central hadn't ordered a new season afterward. However, it's "Bender's Big Score" that's typically listed as the fans' favorite; it's filled with fan service that was well-appreciated after five years of the show's absence, and its constant returns to the show's inciting incident in 1999 made it feel extremely significant as a part of the show's canon. But all four movies were miracles as far as the fans were concerned at the time, and the showrunners felt that way most of all. As Cohen put it in the DVD commentary, "That was a really stunning, positive meeting after years of hearing nothing."