Warning: Spoilers ahead for Umbrella Academy season 1.
So, you just binged through Netflix’s darkly quirky take on superheroes, Umbrella Academy season 1, and you’re wondering if you’ll ever get to find out what happens after that wild, world-ending finale? Well, let’s start with the bad news: Netflix has yet to renew the time-jumping sci-fi series for a season 2. However, that doesn’t mean the minds behind Umbrella Academy aren’t thinking about what’s next — and then what comes after that.
In fact, everyone from showrunner Steve Blackman to star Emmy Raver-Lampman is considering the long game when it comes to the Hargreeves siblings and their superpowered, tortured existences. It sounds like they’re already making their Netflix overlords happy enough to possibly merit a sophomore year.
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“I hope we get a second and third and fourth season, but I knew that having a great ending is important for Netflix as a streamer,” writer-executive producer Blackman told Indiewire. While Umbrella gets off to a slow start, it certainly reaches that ultimate Netflix bar with finale “The White Violin.” The season ender confirms seventh Hargreeves sibling Vanya (Ellen Page) — supposedly the “ordinary” one — was always a supervillain in the making. Her powers are so great that she is fated to cause the apocalypse, which she accomplishes in the final seconds of “Violin.” However, Vanya's siblings spirit the entire family off to some great unknown time, all in the hopes of fixing Vanya and saving earth.
Blackman and My Chemical Romance’s Gerard Way, who created the eponymous graphic novels Umbrella Academy is inspired by, are so confident the show will continue that they’re already figuring out where a prospective season 2 will fall in the comic book series’ schedule. “I’m sure you’ll be on Volume 5 or 6 by the time we get to the next one,” Blackman said in the Indiewire interview. Way responded, “No, we’ll be halfway through 4.” At least that bit of banter revealed it takes 18 months, according to Blackman, to complete an Umbrella Academy season.
So, if Netflix does renew the series, the absolute earliest fans can expect a season 2 is August 2020.
Despite the long prospective wait for a season 2, the Umbrella Academy cast is already dreaming about what’s next for their characters. Just ask Emmy Raver-Lampman, who plays the “rumor”-spreading Allison Hargreeves, a movie star who spent season 1 avoiding her abilities after a shame-inducing incident with her young daughter. “If there’s a season 2, I would love to tackle actually using Allison’s powers. Because I don’t the entire season. I was a powerless superhero,” the new Netflix star tells Refinery29, adding with a laugh. “[I’m] hoping that I’m talking again.”
Although Raver-Lampman jokes about the loss of Allison’s voice in the final episodes of season 1, she actually has a fairly optimistic outlook on what that near-tragedy may mean for her superhero the next time we see her. “Allison might come back with a deeper, better understanding of her power that she didn’t necessarily have in this [past] season,” the former Hamilton actress speculates. “It actually could have been the best thing that has happened to her. To kind of humble her and give her a taste of life without [her powers] … I think if anything, it will make her a wiser, smarter, better user of the powers she has been given.”
Now we wait to see if Netflix will give Allison — and the rest of her dysfunctional family — that chance.