Seth MacFarlane told a Deadline Contenders TV crowd on Saturday that a direct-to-Peacock “Ted” movie with the live-action series cast is on the table, the clearest signal yet that the foul-mouthed teddy bear isn’t done despite the streamer balking at a third season’s price tag.
The pitch came during the “Ted” panel on April 25, with MacFarlane joined onstage by co-star Alanna Ubach. “It really is up to Peacock with their, you know, vast amounts of big Scrooge McDuck money that they dive into every day,” MacFarlane said, before adding that he, Ubach, and the rest of the cast would be game for either a Season 3 or a feature. “It’s all on the table.”
Ubach echoed him. “The wonderful thing about a character-driven show is that the possibilities are endless, right?”
The Saturday remarks soften MacFarlane’s earlier line on the show’s future. In a March 6 interview with TheWrap timed to the Season 2 premiere, he said there was “no plan” for a third season because Peacock and Universal had told him the show was “really expensive to produce and there’s no way to do it at a lower cost.” Some estimates put the per-episode budget between $8 million and $10 million, and MacFarlane has compared the workload to “doing an Avengers movie every 22 minutes.”
That’s why the bear, voiced by MacFarlane and built by Framestore’s Melbourne crew, is the line item nobody can shrink. He’s also the whole show.
The Season 2 finale was written as a hard out. Young John, played by Max Burkholder, walks into a gym, with the implication that he comes out the other side as Mark Wahlberg’s adult John from the 2012 film. “Brad Walsh and Paul Corrigan and I kind of painted ourselves into a corner,” MacFarlane told TheWrap. “Is there a way to do it? There’s always a way to do anything. But at the moment, it might take some narrative acrobatics.”
A direct-to-Peacock film would route around the weekly TV grind that priced the show out. It would also keep Ubach, Burkholder, Scott Grimes, and Giorgia Whigham working in the 1993-Framingham version of the universe MacFarlane built across two seasons of seven and eight episodes.
Peacock hasn’t blinked yet. A spokesperson declined to comment to TheWrap on whether the series will be renewed.
The streamer isn’t short on “Ted” anyway. An animated continuation, set after the events of “Ted 2” and bringing back Wahlberg, Amanda Seyfried, and Jessica Barth, is deep into its first-season production cycle. MacFarlane told the Contenders crowd it’s “joyful” to watch Corrigan and Walsh run the new version. The original 2012 movie, he reminded the audience, was first pitched as an animated TV show before it became a $549 million theatrical hit.
Season 1 of the live-action prequel landed on Peacock on January 11, 2024, and became the platform’s most-watched original within three days. Season 2 premiered March 5 and has logged over 1.2 billion watch hours, per Peacock’s own count, making it the most-watched scripted comedy on any streamer this spring.
