Community Movie Script Is Nearly Done And Dan Harmon Has A Plan
"Six seasons and a movie" was the popular rallying cry for fans of "Community," the beloved but perennially low-rated NBC sitcom that had to limp over to the now-dead Yahoo Screen platform for its final season. But the show's fandom has endured, and series creator Dan Harmon has seemingly never stopped trying to live up the back half of that promise. We've been reporting about a potential "Community" movie for nearly a decade now, since the show concluded in 2015, and in recent years, the stories have stopped feeling like a pipe dream and have started to feel like... Well, like something that's actually, truly, literally going to happen.
Harmon (whose legacy has proven to be complicated, to put it mildly) was the subject of a new profile in The Hollywood Reporter. Although the bulk of the article is about the ongoing trials behind the scenes of "Rick and Morty" and his attempts to live a happier, healthier life following a number of public and personal controversies, no piece about Harmon is complete without an update on that "Community" movie.
So here we go. In brief: the script is nearly finished, and Harmon just needs a few more days to polish everything alongside co-writer Andrew Guest, who previously wrote on "Community." And Harmon notes that getting the script in perfect shape is important to him for a key reason.
Getting the gang back together
The THR profile confirms that every major "Community" cast member will return for the film (save for Chevy Chase, who had a very public falling out with Harmon and whose character was killed off on the show). However, this seems to weigh heavily on Harmon, who says that perfecting the script for a cast of in-demand folks who certainly don't need to be in a "Community" movie feels all-important:
"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. 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.'"
Although plot details on the "Community" movie remain largely unknown, we do know the story will revolve around a class reunion at Greendale Community College, which will give the cast of characters (scattered across the world by the series finale) a reason to be in the same room again. At the very least, the film should offer a platform for Harmon — who has spent the years since "Community" being very public about trying to be a better person and trying to make up for the pain he caused others earlier in his career (including in the "Community" writers room) — to showcase a changed worldview. The original series always felt like a deeply personal project, one that reflected the moods, whims, and beliefs of its creator. Based on the quote above, and the very specific anxiety being expressed, it sounds like this will continue with the film.
The "Community" movie doesn't have a release date, but all signs suggest it'll be a Peacock streaming original.