Rick and Morty Movie: Jacob Hair to Direct Warner Bros. Animated Feature
TL;DR: Warner Bros. is developing a Rick and Morty animated feature film with Jacob Hair, the show's supervising director since 2019, in talks to helm the project. Plot details remain under wraps, but co-creator Dan Harmon has described his vision as a big-budget standalone adventure rather than a franchise-altering canonical event. No release date or streaming platform has been confirmed yet.
Twelve seasons. That's the renewal commitment Adult Swim made to Rick and Morty, a number that puts the franchise in genuinely rare company for an animated cable series — and now Warner Bros. wants to translate that sustained ratings muscle into theatrical gold. According to The Hollywood Reporter, Jacob Hair, the show's supervising director since 2019, is in talks to helm a Rick and Morty animated feature film for Warner Bros. For a franchise analyst, the math here is straightforward: basic cable's most-watched comedy over multiple consecutive seasons, a built-in global fanbase, and a studio hungry for IP that doesn't require a live-action budget. The question isn't whether a movie makes business sense. The question is whether Warner Bros. can thread the needle between satisfying hardcore fans and opening wide enough to matter at the box office.
What Dan Harmon Actually Said About the Film's Direction
The clearest signal about what this movie will and won't be came straight from co-creator Dan Harmon himself. Speaking in a junket interview with CinemaBlend, Harmon was unambiguous about the director choice: "Jacob Hair is the director. We didn't shop around." That kind of statement, blunt and free of PR spin, tells you something about how the creative team views this project. They're not treating it as a prestige pivot that requires an outside auteur to legitimize it.
Harmon had already outlined his philosophical framework for a Rick and Morty film back in 2023, telling The Hollywood Reporter, "My philosophy would be to just take a Rick and Morty adventure, and spend a bunch of extra money on it and make it 90 minutes long. Not to try to earn its feature status by virtue of canonical dramatic tone shifts or anything like that, but rather to just make it a super badass episode of Rick and Morty." That's a specific creative mandate. Most trade coverage is framing this as a straightforward franchise expansion, but the more revealing read is that Harmon is explicitly rejecting the South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut model, where the movie becomes a tonal departure that redefines the property. He's betting that scale alone — not reinvention — justifies the jump to theaters. Whether that's confidence or conservatism depends entirely on the script.
Core Details: Director, Studio, and Where the Project Stands
Here's what we know with confidence, as reported by The Hollywood Reporter on May 19, 2026:
- Director: Jacob Hair, supervising director of Rick and Morty since 2019, currently in talks
- Studio: Warner Bros. (parent company of Adult Swim)
- Status: Early development — no plot details officially confirmed
- Source material: Rick and Morty, the Adult Swim animated series that debuted in 2013
- Co-creators: Dan Harmon and Justin Roiland (Roiland was cut by Adult Swim in early 2023 following felony domestic abuse charges, which were later dismissed)
- Voice cast: Both Rick and Morty have been recast since Roiland's departure; the new voice actors have carried the roles through Season 8 and into Season 9
- Series status: Season 9 launches this Sunday; renewed through Season 12
- Spinoff in pipeline: President Curtis, featuring voice actor Keith David, is set to premiere soon on Adult Swim
- Runtime/release date: Not yet announced — project is in early development
Movie OTT is tracking the project's development across all confirmed platforms and will update streaming availability as distribution details emerge.
The Franchise History That Makes This Film Commercially Viable
Rick and Morty premiered on Adult Swim on December 2, 2013, created by Dan Harmon (Community) and Justin Roiland. The show centers on Rick Sanchez, a brilliantly unhinged scientist, and his teenage grandson Morty, whose interdimensional adventures function simultaneously as absurdist comedy and, in its better episodes like "The Ricklantis Mixup" (Season 3, Episode 7), genuinely affecting character studies.
The series has won two Primetime Emmy Awards for Outstanding Animated Program (2018 and 2020) and ranked as basic cable's most-watched comedy across multiple recent seasons, according to Adult Swim's own broadcast data. That's not a small claim. Basic cable comedy is a shrinking category, which makes dominance within it more meaningful, not less — it signals audience loyalty rather than passive viewership. The Season 3 premiere in 2017 drew 3.9 million viewers on its initial broadcast, numbers that most cable comedies haven't touched since.
Justin Roiland voiced both title characters until his exit in early 2023. The recasting was handled without significant audience defection, which is itself a data point: the franchise's value lives in Harmon's writing and the universe's mythology, not in any single performer. Zack Snyder (yes, that Zack Snyder) even appeared as himself in a Season 8 cameo after reportedly lobbying Harmon to help get a film made, telling him he'd use his "Snyder-ness" to push the project forward. That's either charming or deeply strange, depending on your tolerance for crossover fan energy.
Jacob Hair's tenure as supervising director since 2019 spans the show's most challenging creative period — the post-Roiland transition — which makes him the logical, risk-mitigating choice to direct a feature. Movie OTT's franchise coverage has the full season-by-season breakdown for readers who want context on the show's creative arc.
Why Warner Bros. Is Making This Bet Now, and What the Numbers Say
The animated feature market is a useful frame here. The Super Mario Bros. Movie (2023) grossed over $1.36 billion worldwide, per Box Office Mojo, on a reported production budget of around $100 million. A 13.6x return ratio. Every studio executive memorized that number immediately. Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse proved that stylistically ambitious animation could win both critical awards and commercial audiences simultaneously. Warner Bros. has watched competitors monetize IP-driven animated films and needs its own pipeline beyond the DC animated space.
Rick and Morty as a property has specific advantages. The fanbase skews older than typical animation audiences (18-34, with strong male demographic concentration), which aligns with theatrical moviegoing patterns in the US and UK. The show's international footprint is substantial — Adult Swim content has meaningful viewership across Europe and, increasingly, in India through streaming distribution.
The thing nobody mentions in most coverage of this announcement is that the recasting of the lead voices actually helps the film. New voice actors bring no tabloid baggage, and the theatrical debut of the recast Rick and Morty gives the studio a clean marketing narrative. Hard to say if that was part of the original calculus, but it's a genuine structural advantage now.
Comparable animated feature deals suggest production budgets in the $80-120 million range for a project of this profile. Warner Bros. Animation has the infrastructure. The risk isn't production — it's distribution strategy. Theatrical-first or streaming-first? That window decision will define the film's commercial ceiling.
How This Lands for Indian Audiences and Where to Watch
India is a growth market for Adult Swim content that the studio has only partially tapped. Rick and Morty is currently available in India via HBO Max (now Max) content deals, though regional availability shifts frequently across platforms. As of this writing, Indian viewers have been accessing the series through JioCinema and select Tata Play Binge packages, though availability varies by season and licensing cycle.
For the feature film, the most likely Indian distribution scenario runs through one of these channels:
- Max (HBO Max India equivalent): Most probable for streaming rights given Warner Bros.' existing relationship with the platform
- JioCinema: Possible co-distribution given the platform's aggressive content acquisition in 2025-2026
- Theatrical: PVR INOX and Cinepolis India both have precedent distributing adult-animation features in English with subtitles, though the market for this genre remains niche
- Regional language dubbing: No Hindi or regional language dub has been confirmed; the existing TV series does not have official Hindi dubbing, making a theatrical Hindi dub for the film a meaningful acquisition decision
For Indian audiences, the more relevant box-office comp isn't Super Mario Bros. — it's Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, which grossed approximately ₹68 crore in India on the strength of exactly this demographic: urban, English-comfortable, animation-literate 18-34 males. That proved the ceiling for adult-skewing animation in Indian theaters is real but modest, which means the streaming window matters more than the theatrical run for Warner Bros.' India P&L. Movie OTT tracks Indian streaming availability in real time across Netflix, Prime Video, JioCinema, Hotstar, SonyLIV, and Zee5, and will publish the confirmed India release window as soon as it's locked.
The India release date is TBA. Given early development status, a 2027 theatrical window seems realistic, with streaming availability following the standard 45-90 day window post-theatrical release.
What Comes Next: Season 9, the Spinoff, and the Theatrical Window Race
The immediate near-term calendar matters for how this film gets positioned. Season 9 of Rick and Morty launches this Sunday, which functions as a sustained marketing platform for the broader franchise. Every episode that performs well in Season 9 is an argument Warner Bros. can make to greenlight a larger production budget for the feature.
President Curtis, the Adult Swim spinoff featuring Keith David, represents the studio's parallel bet on franchise extension through TV rather than film. If President Curtis performs — and Keith David's casting is genuinely interesting from a demographic-broadening perspective — it validates the universe's elasticity beyond the two title characters.
Watch for: official trailer drop (probably tied to San Diego Comic-Con 2026 or 2027), casting announcements for the recast voices in the film context, and any movement on the theatrical release date. A 2027 wide release would put the film in direct competition with Pixar's planned slate and whatever Illumination has scheduled for that window. Marketing spend, not creative quality, decides those battles.
The Verdict for Fans Deciding Whether to Care
Look — if you've watched Rick and Morty through its roughest creative stretch and stayed invested, this film is exactly what you wanted: the creative team treating it as a big-budget episode rather than a desperate franchise pivot. Harmon's stated philosophy is the right one. The director choice is low-risk and high-credibility. The studio has the resources.
Should you watch it? Yes, conditionally. If you're already a fan of the series, this is the theatrical version of the show you love, not a reinvention of it. If you've never watched Rick and Morty, start with Season 1 on Max or JioCinema before the film arrives. The feature will almost certainly reward familiarity with the characters.
The bigger question — and I keep coming back to this — is whether Warner Bros. commits to a proper theatrical release or routes this straight to streaming. That single decision will determine whether this becomes a cultural event or just a very expensive episode that appears on Max one Tuesday morning. Right now, nobody outside the studio knows the answer.
Release date: TBA (early development as of May 2026). Director: Jacob Hair (in talks). Platform: Warner Bros. / Max likely; theatrical distribution unconfirmed.
