Dan Harmon Teases ‘Rick and Morty’ Movie, Future Plans
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Dan Harmon is as ready as his fans are for the Rick and Morty movie. And those fans include Hollywood heavyweights like Zack Snyder.
According to Harmon, the Justice League director once summoned him to Warner Bros. to discuss the potential of doing a Rick and Morty film. “Not him saying, ‘I get to do it,’ or anything like that. He was totally a super fan and was just like, ‘Is there any way I can help get that movie started by using my Snyder-ness?’” recalls a genuinely flattered Harmon, who jokes: “So, the Rick and Morty movie is coming as soon as Zack Snyder gets back from his vacation, because I want to start with a Snyder cut of that movie and then I want to do the director’s cut of a Snyder cut release, so we can just have a six-hour Rick and Morty movie and three hours of it is in black and white.”
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In all seriousness, Harmon is very game to bring his franchise, which kicks off its seventh season on Adult Swim Oct. 15, to theaters. There’s no outline yet, much less a script, but he did have one conversation with folks at Warner Bros. (executives, not Snyder) where, he says “it felt like maybe it was time to get the ball rolling.” Sure, Hollywood is big on having meetings, but this one felt different. Harmon walked away confident that everyone was on the same page about the “right conceit” for the movie, should it move forward.
“My philosophy would be to just take a Rick and Morty adventure, and spend a bunch of extra money on it and make it 90 minutes long,” Harmon tells The Hollywood Reporter during an interview for a late Sept. cover story. “Not to try to earn its feature status by virtue of canonical dramatic tone shifts or anything like that, but rather to just make it a super badass episode of Rick and Morty.”
Asked about it on another day, he adds: “I think less is more there because then we can let our animators go nuts, and the animation can be fancier and there can be crazy sequences and stuff.”
Practically speaking, Harmon would prefer to work on the Rick and Morty film while the show is still ongoing. “It’s best that way, because I don’t think it should be this canonical thing that relies on the series to do things and changes everything after that,” he explains, adding: “I think it should actually be the equivalent of Raiders of the Lost Ark, where the idea was, ‘Hey, Indiana Jones already exists as a series in George Lucas’ imagination, so Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark is simply his greatest adventure yet.”
For the record, Rick and Morty isn’t ending any time soon. There are still several more seasons — two of which have largely been written already — before the show completes its previously ordered 70 episodes. And by all accounts, there’s now a well-oiled process in place, which came as Harmon got a handle on his own workflow and, just as importantly, installed Scott Marder as the series’ showrunner. If he has his way, Rick and Morty will run for 100 seasons. In fact, Harmon says, “it’s designed to.”
Which doesn’t mean he hasn’t given thought to how the show might ultimately conclude. If not the final episode or final scene, he has considered what the final moment or moments could entail. At least he did once THR posed the question. “It would maybe just be Morty turning 15 and finding a girlfriend that actually makes him want to be an independent person, so everything is kind of destroyed because Morty just wants to be a teenager now and start to grow up,” he says, and it’s clear he’s tickled by the idea. “Yeah, maybe Morty’s 15th birthday would be the catastrophic sinking of that Titanic.”
Watch THR‘s interview with Harmon, during which he also discusses his favorite episode and lots more:
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