It's been nearly two years since Peacock gave the green light to Community: The Movie, based on the beloved NBC/Yahoo! Screen sitcom that ran from 2009 to 2015, but development on the project has been slow. As for why this is the case, many fans have been quick to put the blame on Donald Glover, who is presently one of the most exciting talents in the entire entertainment industry – but according to Community creator Dan Harmon, that's an erroneous assumption, and he wants people to stop pointing the finger.
Harmon provided the latest update about the development of Community: The Movie during a recent interview with Variety, and he made a specific point of addressing rumors about delays being tied to Donald Glover's schedule and availability. Harmon wants to shut all of that talk down, telling the trade,
I saw where Donald Glover said he’s hearing from fans that they think he’s the reason the movie’s not happening sooner. I immediately wanted to get on my Instagram and say, ‘Stop yelling at Donald! Do you want to scare this guy off?’ He wants to do the movie, stop haranguing him! He’s not the reason, no single human being could be the reason for delays. The frustrating thing is that our engine moves so slowly and so easily gets derailed and stuck. The timescale is so different for us than for the fans. The fans have 900 times more anxiety per minute to feel than than this machine that ultimately gives them their movie.
It takes a whole lot of people to make a movie, and there are a lot of moving parts that have to line up in the studio system in order for a project to move forward. Obviously the availability of one of the film's stars is going to have an impact, but it ultimately is just one cog in the larger machine.
As for what Dan Harmon is doing with the extra development time, he's using it to try and make Community: The Movie even better than it currently has the potential to be. Harmon has co-written a script with Andrew Guest (who was a writer on Community during the show's first two seasons), and he's using the extended pre-production period to polish things up and produce a final draft:
I’m going to use the time that we have to do a final pass on this thing that hopefully makes everybody real excited and happy. In the meantime, can you call them delays when I mean, did we have a shoot day? The engine is still moving.
He makes a point: if there has never been an official release date for Community: The Movie, let alone one that has been pushed back, is it really fair to say that the project has been "delayed"?
In addition to Donald Glover, Joel McHale, Danny Pudi, Alison Brie, Gillian Jacobs, Yvette Nicole-Brown, Jim Rash and Ken Jeong are all set to reprise their original roles from Community. While little is known about the plot of the film, Glover has let it slip to The Hollywood Reporter that a Greendale Community College reunion is involved that will see Abed Nadir (Pudi) directing a movie he sees as his magnum opus (not exactly hard to see how things can get wonderfully meta with that story.
Community: The Movie doesn't presently have a release date, but it will be available to stream with a Peacock subscription whenever it does finally get made. Stay tuned here on CinemaBlend for all of the latest updates about the project.
