Adult Swim’s hit animated series Rick and Morty is headed to the big screen. Ahead of the show’s season 9 premiere on May 24, series co-creator Dan Harmon confirmed to Cinemablend that a movie helmed by the show’s supervising director Jacob Hair is in development.
Hair originally joined the team for season 4, and he directed some of that season’s strongest episodes, namely “The Old Man and the Seat,” “Rattlestar Ricklactica,” and “The Vat of Acid Episode.” In case you don’t remember offhand, that’s the one where Rick has his own private planet to poop on, the one with the snake planet, and the episode where Morty gets a video game save point device that eventually erases his months-long relationship with a wonderful girl. All three of these episodes tell heartfelt, cinematic stories within a very short amount of time. What could Hair do with a lot more runtime at his disposal?
Showrunner Scott Marder pointed out to Cinemablend that if fans want to get a feel for what a movie helmed by Hair might look like, all they need to do is watch the upcoming season 9. As supervising director, Hair is essentially in charge of directing all of the directors, so he has a hand in how every episode turns out. Harmon also confessed that having Hair direct the movie was the ideal scenario rather than “going out and just getting somebody that did a great job on another animated thing.”
A feature-length Rick and Morty movie has been long-rumored before it was leaked yesterday, ultimately prompting Harmon to confirm it. In October 2023, Harmon revealed to The Hollywood Reporter that he’d begun to take early meetings to develop a movie.
“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 said. “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.”
It sounds like we can safely expect the Rick and Morty movie to be more of the same wacky sci-fi hijinks, and it’s unclear as of this writing as to whether or not it might fit narratively in between upcoming seasons or if it’ll offer a standalone narrative. For now, fans have four more full seasons to look forward to — and potentially many more if the show’s contract gets renewed in the coming years.