Adult Swim Has Renewed ‘Rick and Morty’ for Season 6… and Then Some!
Published Feb. 12 2022, 1:27 p.m. ET
When Rick and Morty’s Twitter account posted the Adult Swim show’s Season 5 trailer last March, the caption read, “Now you can start asking us about Season 6.”
Yep, there is going to be a Season 6 of Rick and Morty.
In fact, at the current rate, fans can expect a seventh, eight, ninth, and possibly tenth season of the animated series, thanks to a blockbuster 2018 renewal.
‘Rick and Morty’ got a 70-episode renewal in 2018 — so fans can expect another 50 episodes, if not more.
In May 2018, Deadline announced that Adult Swim had ordered a “staggering” 70 additional episodes of Rick and Morty in a long-term deal with Dan Harmon and Justin Roiland, the creators of the show.
At the time, Rick and Morty had only aired 31 episodes, so that renewal meant that fans hadn’t even seen a third of the show at that point. And even now, after the conclusion of Season 5 last September, fans have only seen 20 of those additional 70 episodes, with another 50 to go.
Adult Swim’s renewal makes sense, though: The show became the top TV comedy for millennials in 2017, and its Season 3 finale drew the biggest audience in Adult Swim history, according to Deadline. Plus, the show had spawned video games, tabletop games, short films, and pop-up shops.
“Rick and Morty is truly what a modern-day hit looks like across multiple screens and multiple touchpoints,” Christina Miller, then the president of Cartoon Network, Adult Swim, and Boomerang, said in a statement upon the show’s third-season finale.
Dan Harmon said he and the ‘Rick and Morty’ writers had started developing Season 6 in December 2020.
At a PaleyFest NY panel in October 2020, Dan told Rick and Morty fans that he and the writers were simultaneously working on the show’s fifth and sixth seasons.
“I often get confused right now between Season 5 and Season 6,” he said, per Inverse. “Immediately after this panel, I’ll be reviewing an animatic for a late Season 5 episode. Yet, we are very late in the season … writing Season 6, looking at finales for both seasons, and then also refining the finale of one and the premiere of another.”
A Season 6 premiere date hasn’t been announced, but the writers have already plotted out Season 7.
In February 2021, Rick and Morty writer Alex Rubens announced on Twitter that the team had started scripting the show’s seventh season. That August, writer Cody Zigler tweeted to say that Season 7 had been wrapped.
Unfortunately, Rick and Morty fans don’t yet have a premiere date for Season 6, though the show confirmed at last year’s Adult Swim Festival that the new season was scheduled for a release sometime in 2022, according to Comicbook.com.
Based on the lengths of the hiatuses between prior Rick and Morty seasons, Inverse speculates that Season 6 will debut this fall — or possibly sooner if Adult Swim splits Season 6 into two batches of episodes.
