Warning: SPOILERS for Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale are ahead!
The Downton Abbey TV series ended in 2015 after six seasons, but fans continued to spend time with the Crawley family and their staff for three theatrical movies. Now, with Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale’s release on the 2025 movies schedule, it looks like this historical drama has finally come to a close… right? Downton Abbey creator Julian Fellowes addressed one way this franchise could possibly come back, as well as why it never delved into World War II.
Why Downton Abbey Skipped World War II
Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale takes place in 1930, just one year after the Wall Street Crash and 18 years after the sinking of the Titanic, when we met these characters. In an interview with THR, Julian Fellowes said that he always knew this saga was going to end with Mary Talbot taking over the Downton estate and her parents, Robert and Cora, moving into the house where the late Violet Grantham once lived. Fellowes knew he didn’t want to go any further than that, saying:
I’m not a fan of talcum powder hair and wobbly stick acting. To go on, we would be pushing our luck a bit and eventually be facing the Second World War.
Although the Downton Abbey TV series took place across 13 years, I agree with Fellowes that making the jump to 1939, when World War II began, would have been too much of a stretch. It’s one thing to cover so many years when you’re making seasons comprised of seven or eight episodes that are an hour each, it’s another thing to cover such a large amount of time over just a few movies that run approximately two hours. Had two or three more Downton Abbey movies been made, maybe hitting the late 1930s or early 1940s could have been accomplished, but fans will just have to make do with the series covering World War I.
How Julian Fellowes Thinks Downton Abbey Could Return
Even with this latest movie being called The Grand Finale, there are questions about if Downton Abbey could continue/return someday. While Julian Fellowes has said multiple times that this will be the last time we see this generation of characters, he mentioned in a separate interview with EW he’s open to the possibility of revisit the property through a different lens. In his words:
[I’m] not against the idea of revisiting Downton, but it would have to be in a different period of history so that their problems were different and they were facing different issues. On that basis, I don't see why not, but we'll have to see what happens.
One possibility is going backwards in time to see how the Downton estate was run in the late 1800s or even further back. However, this may overlap too much with what Fellowes is doing with HBO’s The Gilded Age, and Fellowes has acknowledged that a crossover between the two properties could work. The other option is jumping ahead several decades and seeing what’s going on at Downton in the 1960s or 1970s. This would allow for us to spend time with the now-adult-aged children of characters like Mary and Edith.
For now, the book is closed on Downton Abbey, but obviously if that changes in the coming years, we’ll let you know. While The Grand Finale continues its theatrical run, the TV series and first two movies can be streamed with a Peacock subscription.
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