Sam Heughan and Caitroina Balfe open to returning for Outlander movie to finish the series

This past Friday, Starz kicked off the second half of the seventh season of Outlander, catching fans up with that Jamie and Claire Fraser (Sam Heughan and Caitriona Balfe) have been doing over the past year. They're back in Scotland, but it doesn't look like that will last long.

After this half-season wraps up, there's only one more season of Outlander left before the show is done forever...or is there? Heughan and Balfe appeared on The One Show where they were asked whether they might return for an Outlander movie down the line. “Yeah, I mean never say never, right?" Balfe said. "I think if that was wanted we would always want to…”

Heughan chimed in as well: “If that’s what the fans want, how can we deny them? But yeah, we’ll see.”

Part of the reason there may be a demand for an Outlander movie is because the show, will not adapt the whole of Diana Gaboldon's Outlander novels. Roughly speaking, the show has adapted the books at about a rate of one book per season. There will be eight seasons of the show by the time it's done, and Gabaldon is still working on the tenth and final Outlander book. You do the math.

Sam Heughan describes Jamie and Claire's final scene together on Outlander

So we'll see whether there's appetite for more Outlander after the eighth and final season wraps up. For now, fans are enjoying the second half of the seventh season, with new episodes dropping every Friday on Starz. But it's hard not to think about the coming of the end, especially when Heughan and Balfe keep dropping hints about it.

During their chat on the One Show, the pair promised it would be "emotional," and Heughan even gave us some fine grain details: “A seven and a half minute scene,” he said. “Lots of dialogue. And the dialogue, as in Outlander, normally these scenes are, it was very dramatic...A lot of goodbyes in the scene but then it had this double meaning because we were also saying goodbye ourselves.”

I get the idea that saying goodbye is going be an emotional experience for fans as well, which is why the idea of a movie might help calm some nerves. There's also an Outlander prequel series debuting on Starz next year. It's called Blood of My Blood and will revolve around Jamie's and Claire's parents. So Starz has no intention of letting the fans starve.

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h/t Daily Record