COMMUNITY Creator Dan Harmon Offers Update on the Upcoming Movie

Dan Harmon, best known as the creator of hit series Community and Rick and Morty, is getting back to working on the long-awaited spinoff movie, Community: The Movie, which has been on hold amid the pandemic. Returning star Joel McHale has kept fans updated on the status of the movie, always reminding us that it was moving forward, despite the necessary pauses. Now Harmon, who’s returning to write the screenplay for the film, is also giving us an update as he gets back to work, post-WGA strike.

In an interview with THR, Harmon said that he and one of his former Community writers, Andrew Guest, still need to hole up for a few days and finish the script. They pitched it to buyers, pre-pandemic, as a Greendale Community College reunion (minus Chevy Chase), and they’re committed to getting it to a place where they can shoot it as is — or as close to as is as possible without rewrites.

“I don’t want these now-superstar people, like Emmy-winning Donald Glover, who are bothering to gather out of loyalty to this thing, to come back and once again be getting blue pages run down by an intern that totally contradict what they spent all night memorizing,” says Harmon. “I want to have a veneer of, ‘Here’s your reward.’ I don’t want them to go, like, ‘Oh, he’s learned nothing, he’s treating us like cattle again.’ ” 

Joel McHale will be joined in the film by returning co-stars Donald Glover as Troy Barnes; Danny Pudi as Abed Nadir; Alison Brie as Annie Edison; Gillian Jacobs as Britta Perry; Jim Rash as Dean Pelton; and Ken Jeong as Ben Chang. We still don’t know for sure if Yvette Nicole Brown will return, but it’s sounding likely. Keith David is also expected to reprise his role as Elroy Patashnik.