Community creator reveals what he’s ruled out of the movie: ‘Running around with guns in a school was never good on TV’

Community creator Dan Harmon has said the forthcoming film will not feature paintball.

In September, it was announced that the show’s long awaited movie spin-off is in the works. Original stars Joel McHale, Gillian Jacobs, Danny Pudi, Alison Brie, Jim Rash, and Ken Jeong will return.

The hit NBC sitcom ran from 2009 to 2015. The series followed a group of adult students at a Colorado community college

Community starred McHale, Jeong, Pudi, Jacobs, Brie, Rash, Chevy Chase, Donald Glover, and Yvette Nicole Brown.

During a recent guest appearance on the Community recap podcast Six Seasons and a Podcast, Harmon revealed a few key details about the film.

Harmon – who is also the co-creator of the hit animated series Rick and Morty – ruled out the possibility that the film will include any paintball warfare.

He said: “It’s a lot easier for me to rule stuff out than tell you what we’re pursuing.

“For instance, we go, ‘Do we really think it’d be a good idea for the Community movie to be a paintball episode? 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.”

Across the show’s six seasons, there were five episodes focusing on a college-wide high-stakes paintball game.

The original paintball episode – titled “Modern Warfare”, which aired in season one – is regularly cited as a fan favourite, with the subsequent four instalments also regularly ranking at the top of “best episode” lists.

Harmon said, however, that he felt the follow-up episodes to the first season’s paintball episode failed to live up to the original.

He added that the conceit of the episodes – in which people are “running around with guns in a school” – was “never a good idea on TV, even back then”.

He said: “You sit down to write the movie and you’re like, ‘So, we’d do that, right?’ Because it’s so emblematic of what made our show special and the triumphs that we had – the things that we contributed as a show,” he said.

Harmon also went on to shoot down any possibility of the movie taking form as a Dungeons & Dragons game, which was another much-loved concept in the original series.

“I kinda gotta rule that out – maybe a better writer wouldn’t,” said Harmon, who is co-writing the film with Andrew Guest, who co-wrote the fan-favourite season two episode “Advanced Dungeons & Dragons”.

Community the Movie is scheduled for release next year. A specific date has not yet been announced.