How much longer will the Community movie be deferred?
It’s been a decade since the NBC sitcom concluded its six-season run with the promise of “#andamovie” flashing on screen at the end of the series finale.
Trae Patton/NBCU Photo Bank/NBCUniversal via Getty
In a 2024 interview with Deadline, two years after Peacock greenlit the long-awaited project, series star Joel McHale teased: “I really do think it’s happening this year, and probably next week.”
At the time, he cited “working around” Donald Glover‘s busy schedule as reason for possible delay, which Glover denied and McHale recanted.
Two years later, the Community movie remains at a standstill. So what happened?
“We got very close to shooting that,” Community writer Andrew Guest revealed on the Feb. 26 episode of The Watch podcast. “As the writers’ strikes and actors’ strikes were ending [in 2023], all of our cast were available. All of them wanted to do it. We had a line producer. We had a script that we were in the process of starting to rewrite and one of our actors’ projects sort of came in conflict in terms of timing.”
Although other television shows, like Arrested Development‘s 2013 season on Netflix, have managed scheduling conflicts by filming scenes with actors separately, Guest insists that won’t work for Community.
Get your daily dose of entertainment news, celebrity updates, and what to watch with our EW Dispatch newsletter.
“The fun and energy of that show is the chemistry between these people in the same room, around a table,” he told The Watch’s Andy Greenwald. “So we have to have them all in the same place at the same time.”
Lewis Jacobs/NBC
However, that wasn’t always the case on Community. Behind-the-scenes drama with Chevy Chase resulted in the Saturday Night Live alum shooting separately from the rest of the cast before he left the show in 2013.
“There was some of that done with one particular actor occasionally,” Guest admitted with a laugh. “But the rest of the cast are delightful, all get along great, and we want them in the same place.”
Check out The Watch‘s full interview with Andrew Guest below.