Community movie won't feature paintball war scenes because, you know, guns in school

Community creator Dan Harmon has shared some more details about the forthcoming film. While he’s not clarified what the film will include, he’s gone ahead and crushed the dreams of fans wishing for a homage to the paintball war episodes or a long game of Dungeons & Dragons.

“It’s a lot easier for me to rule stuff out than tell you what we’re pursuing,” Harmon tells People. “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,” he adds.

The debut paintball war episode, “Modern Warfare,” aired in the first season, and became a tradition throughout the series. However, Harmon will be the first to admit that the subsequent episodes failed to “capture the joy” of the original episode.

Plus, Harmon will admit that having a bunch of students “running around with guns in a school” was “never a good idea on TV, even back then.”

While the film could certainly serve as a victory lap for the cult sitcom, Harmon’s looking to take the story out of its original format entirely. While the integration of the paintball war and D&D play allowed the show to extend itself into other genres—breaking the mold at the time—he knows it would not have the same spark in the full-length movie.

“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,” Harmon says. “Or we’d play Dungeons & Dragons for 90 minutes. I kinda gotta rule that out—maybe a better writer wouldn’t.”

It is exciting to know that Harmon is not resting on the laurels of the original series when it comes to furthering Community, and offers promise that the movie will be something entirely original.