‘Rick And Morty’ Season 3 Trailer Gag Spawns Mass Release Date Confusion

Thanks to some bad reporting and a social media gag, we’ve been awash in articles claiming that Rick and Morty Season 3 has finally entered production.

Lucky for us all, this is not the case. Production has been going on for months. Rick and Morty Season 3 is almost done. There’s not a release date yet, but it might be April 9 (if Mr. Poopy Butthole has anything to say about it). The wait would be way longer if production was only starting now.

The earliest source for this claim seems to come from a comprehensively incorrect Comicbook.com post. Soon, other sites were running with the same narrative, tying a 2016 tweet from Rick and Morty writer Mike McMahan to a video posted by Adult Swim Australia, titled “Rick and Morty - EXCLUSIVE! SEASON 3 Opening Scene.”

Here’s that tweet (again, from over a year ago), announcing vocal recording for the Rick and Morty Season 3 premiere:

And here’s the video, which promises a scene from Rick and Morty Season 3, but is instead a Rickroll attempting to compensate for a decade-old joke with an intensive curation of clips from the previous two seasons:

Despite the causal link being drawn in articles claiming Adult Swim “ brutally trolled fans” with a bait-and-switch, swapping Season 3 footage for the imagined production announcement, the video and the tweet are unrelated. McMahan cleared up the confusion:

The Rick and Morty Season 3 release date may still be a big unknown, but at least we don’t have to wait for new episodes to go through the entire animation process. It’ll be here soon.