Community Movie Gets Update From Creator Dan Harmon

Community is finally getting that movie adaptation the cast and fans have been hyping up for years now. Community: The Movie will bring back much of the original cast, including Joel McHale, Danny Pudi, Gillian Jacobs, Alison Brie, Ken Jeong, and Jim Rash – with Donald Glover recently confirmed to return, with indications that Yvette Nicole Brown is coming back as well. (Just don’t expect Chevy Chase to join in the fun again…) 

Of course, the Community movie (like so many other films) has been affected by the Hollywood Actors’ and Writers’ Strikes. Community: The Movie had to shut down production just as it was really getting things in motion. 

“That was a bummer, because we were getting very close,” McHale told TV Line early in the summer (after the WGA Strike, but before the SAG-AFTRA Strike). “But at the same time, I’m a thousand billion percent behind the writers. The writers need to be paid.” [The movie is] still going to happen. When this strike is over, we’ll come back and we’ll make it. And I am sure that [series creator] Dan [Harmon] will put in 12 jokes addressing the fact it took [this long to come together]. But we’ll get there. It just may take a little while.”

However, with the Writer’s Strike having ended, Community and Rick and Morty creator Dan Harmon is getting back to work on the film’s script – and the pressure’s now on to make it a script worthy of the much-more-famous cast of Community: 

“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,” Harmon explained to THR. “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.’ ” 

It remains to be seen if McHale’s prediction turns out to be true – if Harmon will actually incorporate the delay from the strikes into his script for Community: The Movie. The film was presumably going to get meta by having the characters return for a Greendale Community College reunion; having that reunion postponed by a strike within the Greendale workers’ union would actually be pretty fun. 

We’ll keep you updated on the status of Community: The Movie.