Julian Fellowes recently disclosed why he has decided to end the Downton Abbey franchise with its latest entry, Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale. Fellowes is the creator of the original Downton Abbey series, which aired on ITV in the UK from 2010 to 2015. The show’s success led to the development of three movie sequels: the first feature of the same name as the series (2019), Downton Abbey: A New Era (2022), and The Grand Finale.
Julian Fellowes is ending Downton Abbey because of World War 2 and Nazi Germany
Fellowes revealed during a new interview with Entertainment Weekly that he decided that Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale would be the last project in the franchise because he wasn’t interested in exploring stories involving Nazi Germany and World War II. “I didn’t really want to get into the Nazis and Germany and the lead up to the Second World War. I wanted to leave at a time when that had not yet become apparent as a threat,” he said.
This meant that The Grand Finale had to bring down the curtains on the storylines of the main characters of the franchise. Fellowes and his team were able to do that with Maggie Smith’s Violet Crawley in Downton Abbey: A New Era. In 2024, Smith passed away at age 89. “I just felt that we had said goodbye to Maggie, but we haven’t quite said goodbye to everyone else,” Fellowes said in the interview.
The Grand Finale is set in 1930, which, according to Fellowes, is the start of the “modern age” and a world that might seem unfamiliar to the Downton Abbey characters. The screenwriter stated that he wanted to give fans a satisfying ending with The Grand Finale and show how the characters would navigate the new world. “It’s no longer going to be a world of white tie and footmen; that was on its way out,” he elaborated. “So, we needed to be sure that they would be okay,” Fellowes further stated.
Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale premieres in theaters today.
Originally reported by Tamal Kundu on ComingSoon.
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