Dan Harmon, creator of Community, still has a plan for a Community motion picture, which would finally bring to a fruition the classic in-joke from the series of "six seasons and a movie," but he is struggling with a philosophical question about the movie that he feels like he has to deal with before he actually starts to write it, which is namely - who is this movie intended for?
It might sound like a strange question, but it is really the centerpiece around which the Rick and Morty co-creator needs to figure out how to approach the screenplay. Is the movie intended to work for non-fans of the show, or is it only meant for fans of the show?
He explained why that matters on Vulture's Good One podcast, saying, "Here’s the biggest philosophical question: Are you supposed to service a mythical new viewer? The obvious, dogmatic, practical, off-the-street answer is like, No, you don’t. It’s fan service. Why would there be a Community movie? Who do you think is going to walk in off the street and buy popcorn and sit and watch a Community movie like that? They deserve to be punished. Why are they doing that?"
However, as he notes, even if you discount the idea that a "person off the street" will want to watch a Community movie, it is hard not to still want to write the film towards that angle, "Saying that that person doesn’t exist is a lot different from asking yourself structurally if you’re supposed to design the movie for them, because there’s a new viewer inside of all of us. If every Marvel movie started with inside references to all 90 other Marvel movies, even if you had seen all of them — even if on one level you’d be like, This is the greatest Marvel movie ever because all of the movies are in here — I think that a part of your brain would be going, Yeah, but it’s kind of not a good movie for this reason. It’s just speaking in gibberish. What does this mean? I exist in that camp like you?"
So he explains that you still want the movie to stand on its own, "Formalistically, you owe a movie that I think the fans can not only enjoy, but they can stand back and go, You know, the crazy thing about this Community movie is that if you didn’t know there was a show, this is an insanely good movie. There’s a reason to watch it and then definitely watch the series because now you’re like, Holy crap. I don’t know if that’s arrogance, pretentiousness, responsibility, self-deprecation, torture. I can’t get myself out of that camp."
Harmon also worries about giving the characters enough new things to do in the film as opposed to just sort of playing their respective greatest hits. However, at the end of the day, he is thinking about the story for the film and thus is getting closer to actually writing the movie than he has been in some time, as he points out, "I started writing to keep my parents from hitting me, and I now only write to feel valid. But the upside of that is yes, I am, at least once a week, thinking about it, because the gears are turning. There is, like … a thing is happening. Logistically, the locks are coming away. And the only problems are becoming the creative ones, which is great, because I love those problems. I love having these conversations, and they’re being had."