That Community movie may finally be happening!

SIX SEASONS AND A MOVIE! That’s been the rallying cry of Community fans for years now, a meta in-joke started by Danny Pudi’s pop culture-obsessed Abed about what makes a successful TV show. Community looked to be a far cry from life imitating art when creator Dan Harmon split with the show after three seasons giving us the sub-par fourth season. While Harmon returned for the fifth season, the damage had been done and Community was cancelled by NBC. However, it would eventually get picked up for just one more season by Yahoo! just to close out the show’s lingering plot lines in 2014. So that took care of the “six seasons” part, but what about the “movie”?

Over the years we’ve heard mixed reports. The cast has always been eager, but the network where it found itself at the time had gone back and forth on the idea. The one thing that was seemingly consistent was Harmon’s insistence that while a movie “will happen” he would only write it if he felt it was worthwhile and not just a quick cash grab. Well, it would appear that Harmon has found that positivity after all six seasons of Community debuted on Netflix at the start of April to big viewership numbers. And with that resurgence in popularity, it would seem that the Harmon and the bigwigs at the streaming service have been talking, as he explained to The Wrap:

I can tell people for sure that the enthusiasm for Community both for all of this time and the resurgence of it [on Netflix], there’s always an aspect of that affects the marketplace. And when the marketplace gets affected, conversations happen. And when conversations happen, things happen. I mean, when you’re part of the Community family, you learn never to raise expectations, keep ‘em nice and low and then be pleasantly surprised. So I can say that there are conversations happening that people would want to be happening and that I’m very, very excited about the coming months.

Ooh! Say it with me now: TROY AND ABED IN A MOOOOVIE!

Back in 2017, Harmon had felt some confidence about a movie adaptation and had apparently been talking to the Fast & Furious franchise filmmaker Justin Lin about making it happen. Nothing came of it though. If this is legit now though, then there’s only one director I would like to see tackle a Community movie. Or directors – plural – to be exact: Joe and Anthony Russo.

The brotherly filmmakers are two of the biggest names in Hollywood right now thanks to their work with Marvel culminating in the biggest movie of all time with Avengers: Endgame. But you know where they cut their teeth and which gig in their career actually helped to get them into the MCU with Captain America: The Winter Soldier? Yep, Community.

The Russos exec-produced the entire show and director over 20 of its episodes in its early day, including the very action-packed “Paintball” episodes among several other classics. They are a large part of why Community was so damn incredible when it first ran (well them and all the genre skewering meta gags that Harmon came up with). And while they’re very in-demand filmmakers with limited availability these days, they’re totally open to repay the show that launched their careers, as Joe Russo told Collider just last month.

We’d certainly be willing to do it. We love our Community family. That cast, we’re all still very close to all of them. It’d be schedule-depending for us. But I believe there will be a Community movie, especially now that it’s doing well on streaming. Someone like Netflix could step up and make the movie.

Well, it looks like Netflix is probably stepping up, so let’s make this happen! Six seasons and a big-budget blockbuster movie by the Russo Bros! In the meantime, because there’s no such thing as too much Community, the cast of Joel McHale, Gillian Jacobs, Dani Pudi, Yvette Nicole Brown, Alison Brie, Ken Jeong, and Donald Glover will be reuniting remotely for a reunion this week to do a table read of the season five episode “Cooperative Polygraphy.” There will be no Chevy Chase though after he infamously left the show on bad terms, but The Mandalorian’s Pedro Pascal will reportedly be joining as a special guest. Sony Pictures TV will air the entire table read along with a Q&A of fan questions (submitted on social media with the hashtag #AskCommunity) next week Monday, 18 May 2020. This will be part of a fundraiser towards charities benefiting COVID-19 relief efforts.

Last Updated: May 12, 2020