Community: The Movie is going low concept.
While the plot of the highly anticipated, feature-length revival is being kept under wraps, series creator Dan Harmon is revealing what you won’t see when the #SaveGreendale committee is reunited.
“It’s a lot easier for me to rule stuff out than tell you what we are pursuing,” Harmon says on Friday’s episode of Six Seasons and a Podcast. “For instance, we go, ‘Do we really think it would be a good idea for the Community movie to be a paintball episode?’ I think it’s one of the first things to rule out because it’s the first thing off the top of your head, and that’s an issue with the Community movie concept. We did a lot of episodes where, from page one to page 30, you are joyfully locked into a construct that isn’t a traditional sitcom narrative, but is, in fact, through the lens of David Fincher or Martin Scorsese, or though the lens of one of the characters…. There were a lot of special episodes that, for lack of a better term, were genre homages, and the paintball thing was one of them.”
Another one, he acknowledges, is Dungeons & Dragons. “I kinda gotta rule that out,” he says. “Maybe a better writer wouldn’t.”
Harmon, who’s penning Community: The Movie with fellow series scribe Andrew Guest, ultimately concluded that “we need to make sure that this movie, that its premise alone, doesn’t prohibit a pretty long list of things that you might want to get out of a Community movie. I could riff on some examples of things that I think would be a bad way to get started on a Community movie,” the first being that Greendale has been shut down for 10 years. “You’re not going to do anything terribly clever using the school’s demise or resurrection as a device,” and “you don’t want too much of your movie to be spent [in an] unrecognizable [place].” He also rules out having the events of the movie play out over a “single night.”
What he does suggest is that the study group will have spent a significant amount of time apart. “It’s not because they swore each other off,” he says. “There’s a reason to get together, and then there’s a reason they have to stay together.”
As previously reported, former series regulars Joel McHale (Jeff Winger), Danny Pudi (Abed Nadir), Alison Brie (Annie Edison), Gillian Jacobs (Britta Perry), Jim Rash (Dean Pelton) and Ken Jeong (Ben Chang) are set to star. Late-in-run cast member Keith David (Elroy Patashnik) is also expected back, but Donald Glover (Troy Barnes), Yvette Nicole Brown (Shirley Bennett) and Chevy Chase (the late Pierce Hawthorne) remain question marks.
Listen to the full Six Seasons and a Podcast interview below, then hit the comments with your hopes for the Community movie.
Listen to “Intro to Remedial Cinematic Pitches with Very Special Guest Dan Harmon” on Spreaker.