Firefly Is Flying Again (Maybe): Everything We Know About the Animated Series
Back in 2008 Matt wrote a post here called Serenity 2 Not Happening…for the 50th time. Eighteen years later, something is finally happening. Not a sequel, not a reboot, but an animated series with the original crew doing the voices. Here’s where it stands as of mid-October 2026.
The short version
- What: an animated Firefly series, reportedly titled Firefly: Still Flying.
- Who: Nathan Fillion is producing through his company, Collision33, with 20th Television Animation. ShadowMachine is doing the animation. Marc Guggenheim and Tara Butters are the showrunners.
- Cast: Fillion and Alan Tudyk, with Gina Torres, Morena Baccarin, Jewel Staite, Sean Maher, Summer Glau and Adam Baldwin reported as returning to voice their characters.
- When it’s set: between the end of the TV series and the movie Serenity. That means Wash is alive. So is everybody else.
- Joss Whedon: not involved. Fillion has said Whedon gave the project his blessing.
- Where you’ll watch it: nowhere yet. As of August the show still had no network or streamer.
How we got here
September 20, 2002. Firefly premieres on Fox with “The Train Job,” which was never meant to be the first episode. Fox airs the episodes out of order.
December 2002. Fox pulls the show after 11 of its 14 episodes have aired.
December 2003. The DVD set comes out with all 14 episodes, including the three Fox never aired. It sells, and keeps selling.
September 30, 2005. Serenity hits theaters. Universal made a movie out of a cancelled TV show because the fans wouldn’t shut up about it. We had two galleries of it here.
2008. Matt reports the movie sequel is not happening for the 50th time, and that the show is coming to Blu-ray.
The years in between. The story keeps going in comics, first from Dark Horse and later from BOOM! Studios, and in a run of novels from Titan Books. The cast keeps showing up together at conventions.
March 2026. Fillion and the cast post a week of mysterious videos on social media. Fans go looking for clues. Fillion’s own post asking people to share it is liked more than 900,000 times.
March 15, 2026. At a Firefly reunion panel at Awesome Con in Washington, D.C., Fillion announces the animated series. A video shown with the news included a pilot script titled “Athenia,” labeled episode 201: season two, in other words. It’s a continuation, not a do-over.
August 2026. Fillion tells Entertainment Tonight the show is still looking for a home, and that he has his fingers crossed.
What we don’t know yet
- Where it will stream or air. Reports disagree on how far Disney, which owns Firefly through 20th Television, has committed. Fillion has said the studio got excited about it. Other coverage says it hasn’t signed on to distribute. Either way, there’s a cast, a script, a studio and the rights, but no distributor has been announced.
- Shepherd Book. Ron Glass died in 2016. Whether Book appears, and who would voice him, hasn’t been confirmed.
- When. No release date, no episode count, no trailer.
We’ve been burned before, so we’re not counting chickens. But this is the first time in twenty years that the whole crew has been lined up and ready to go. We’ll update this page as news comes in.
Curious what the crew has been doing since 2005? It’s all in Where Are They Now. Or start the rewatch with our episode guide for the pilot, “Serenity.”
Sources: Deadline, Deadline Q&A with Fillion and Tudyk, Variety, CNN, TVLine, SYFY Wire, Cartoon Brew, Space.com, Boing Boing, Bleeding Cool, Wikipedia: Firefly.