Six seasons and a movie. What started as an off-handed line in the second season of Community quickly became a movement, one that might finally be close to being realized.
On February 16, Alison Brie, who played the studious and overly optimistic Annie Edison on the show, took to Reddit with director Jeff Baena for an AMA (Ask Me Anything) session for her new movie Horse Girl.
Among the various questions asked, ranging from her favourite scene to shoot in her upcoming movie to if she would go by “Brie Brie” if she married Brie Larson, one user innocuously asked if there was any news on the long-discussed Community movie.
Brie simply responded with, “actually got an interesting call about it this week…stay tuned…”
The comment left fans eager and excited about the possibility of the movie finally being made. It was one of the first solid teases in recent memory that something may be in the works, but Brie didn’t elaborate any further on the Reddit thread.
If that wasn’t enough to send people into a fan-fuelled frenzy, a day later Yvette Nicole Brown (who played Community‘s Shirley Bennett) tweeted that she also “got an interesting phone call,” adding fuel to the fire with the hashtag #GreendaleForever
I also got an interesting call.
You never know…#GreendaleForever https://t.co/GJsOFU3Lit
— yvette nicole brown (@YNB) February 17, 2020
This isn’t the first time we’ve gotten a tease about a potential movie. Former Sony Pictures Television president of programming and production, Zack Van Amburg, spoke with The Hollywood Reporter back in 2014 about a movie being in early talks.
But when the show’s sixth and final season was wrapping, show creator Dan Harmon said that Yahoo! Screen, Yahoo!’s video on demand service, wanted to begin production of a movie quickly after and that he wasn’t on board with it, explaining that he wanted some time away from the project.
Things looked up in 2017 when Harmon and The Fast and the Furious director Justin Lin announced that they were working on getting the movie off the ground. Lin had also directed a few episodes of Community, including the iconic first paintball episode.
The cast has also been very supportive of a potential movie as one last send-off. Last year, a majority of the main cast along with Harmon and writer Chris McKenna sat down for a panel at Vulture Festival. When panel moderator Jesse David Fox asked Harmon what it was going to take for the movie to be made, Harmon’s initial response wasn’t that optimistic, believing that if he wrote the script the entirety of the cast would not be on board
Lucky for us, he was promptly proved wrong when the rest of the cast in attendance publicly claimed that if Harmon were to write the script, they would all be down to come back.
One notable omission from the panel was Donald Glover, who played jock-turned-geek Troy Barnes on the show. Glover left the show during its fifth season on his own terms, wanting to focus on more personal projects like his musical persona Childish Gambino and his breakout show Atlanta.
It’s unclear if Glover would return for a future movie, but Community has bounced back before. After being cancelled after its fifth season by NBC, fan calls to keep the series alive were heard, and the show managed to reach its destined sixth season with Yahoo! Screen.
We can only hope that things fall into place and that the fandom’s self-proclaimed prophecy comes true. Until then, you can catch up with Community, streaming for free on CTV Throwback right here.
