Rick and Morty season 5 release date: When will it arrive?
Initially, it looked like the wait between seasons four and five would be far shorter than what fans endured previously.
When season four was renewed, creators Dan Harmon and Justin Roiland spoke with EW about the upcoming episodes and confirmed that "the plan has always been to get them out quicker".
Harmon said: "I think it's safe to say without fear of being wrong that the gap between seasons three and four will be the longest and last time that it's ever so long that it's ridiculous. I don't know how fast we can do it, but I know it will never be this long again."
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Harmon and Roiland even devised new strategies to ensure they deliver new episodes on time.
"We're literally writing season five while finishing season four just to force ourselves to commit to a certain schedule," Harmon explained. "Not to get anyone's hopes up, but it is structured into our deal that if we're going strong and fast there are options to deliver more episodes at a time."
When we first read this interview, we assumed that, if the team managed to stay on track, season five could arrive sooner than expected – and we speculated that it could even air around April 2020, like earlier seasons did.
However, April 2020 came and went without season four even finishing. The mid-season break landed in December 2019, and we were promised we would see the final five episodes in 2020. That finally happened in May, with the final five episodes airing between May 3, 2020 to May 31, 2020.
A five month gap mid-season break is pretty long, and with Rick and Morty fans already impatient, we're glad their resolve wasn't tested any further.
With animators working on the series as it progresses, there's a chance that the coronavirus situation slowed production of the final episodes of season four. If that's the case, then expect a fairly long gap before we see season five.
This series takes a long time to put together. Animation director Nathan Litz revealed how much effort each moment of every episode takes.
He said (via The Express): "You see all the great action go by and it looks fantastic. But you look at it and you think, 'That took four weeks to do, and it played out in one minute'."
