Rick and Morty co-creator Dan Harmon opened up about the Season 3 release date delay, explaining the hold-up to a Sundance Film Festival audience and IndieWire.
“I’m so sorry,” Harmon said. “I don’t have a release date for Season 3. It’s not that I know it and I’m not allowed to say it; it’s [Adult Swim’s] domain. What I will tell you is it’s late because of us, it’s late because of me.”
Despite Harmon’s self-flagellation, Rick and Morty Season 3 hasn’t blown through any official release dates. Instead, the delay is only compared to a statement Harmon made at Magic City Comic Con at the beginning of 2016: “I think Season 3 is — we’re targeting around the end of this year.”
Adult Swim confirmed the lack of a clear release timeframe for Season 3, telling IndieWire there is “no premiere timing to share unfortunately — we’re still deep in production.”
Though Harmon took personal responsibility for the Rick and Morty Season 3 premiere delay, he had trouble articulating exactly how the prolonged production came about. “If Justin were here he’d agree. He and I would go, ‘Yeah, we fucked up,’ and it’s hard to put your finger on how we fucked up. Rick and Morty keeps taking longer and longer to write and I don’t know why.”
One reason Harmon cited is an increasingly difficult writing process. “We have fights all the time and then we have fights about why we’re having fights,” he said. “Well, we didn’t fight during Season 2, that’s why it’s taking longer: all this fighting! So okay, let’s stop fighting.”
While Harmon’s postmortem doesn’t offer a clear sense of where in the production process Rick and Morty currently resides, Harmon and storyboard artist Erica Hayes confirmed on Twitter that episodes are still being animated:
Since storyboarding is done in-house before going to animators in Vancouver, these tweets suggest that, for at least later episodes, Rick and Morty Season 3 is still a ways from completion. That rumored (baselessly, I should add) Feb. 26 release date is looking less and less likely.
