Despite the understandable excitement surrounding Rick & Morty’s recent forays into the medium, a live-action version of the series would never work for numerous reasons. Since the series debuted in 2013, Rick & Morty has repeatedly made it clear that nothing is too zany or off-the-wall for the anarchic animated sitcom. From the sex-crazed dragons of Rick & Morty’s Game of Thrones spoof to the fandom-diving Giant Incest Baby of season 5, episode 4, Rick & Morty knows no bounds when it comes to wild storytelling ideas and absurd humor.

As a result of the show’s freewheeling approach, Rick & Morty viewers were recently excited when the series produced a trio of brief live-action promos. Starring Christopher Lloyd and Jaeden Martell, these short bumpers were typically funny, self-referential snippets of what a live-action Rick & Morty could look like, and much of the show’s sizable fanbase went wild for them. However, despite the popularity of these shorts, Rick & Morty could never work as a live-action series for several reasons.

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Since the show began, Rick & Morty has never been limited by what live-action television can achieve—or afford. The series has seen the title characters destroy entire planets, wage wars, and travel through space, all of which could be prohibitively expensive for a live-action cult sitcom. Rick & Morty have even moved realities numerous times, something very few live-action shows could pull off without a budget larger than an Adult Swim hit can likely afford. However, money is only one of the things that makes animation the right medium for Rick & Morty. The show’s free-for-all zaniness and its dark humor also rely on the series being animated, as a live-action Rick & Morty could easily be both smaller and darker than many audiences would be interested in.

Rick & Morty Is Too (Comically) Gory

Explicit violence and gratuitous gore are probably not the first things that most Rick & Morty viewers would associate with the series, but they certainly would be if the hit ever transitioned to live-action. Even more emotionally grounded episodes like "A Rickconvenient Mort" (season 5, episode 3) feature entire mining crews being melted alive, half a dozen people being graphically slaughtered by the show’s teen hero, and entire planets being reduced to dust by mass extinction events. Not only would this be very expensive to film in live-action, making this amount of violence funny would be a tall order for any director. The horror-comedy genre has made it clear for decades that a plot involving buckets of blood can be funny despite its gross-out elements, but a live-action Rick & Morty’s level of on-screen gore would need to be tamped down massively for the show to maintain the comedic tone it has as an animated series.

The movies of Quentin Tarantino offer an idea of how a live-action Rick & Morty might use screen violence, with most of the director’s goriest moments being brief and comedic in their abrupt execution. The helmer’s more dramatically charged moments of violence, like the cop’s ordeal in Reservoir Dogs, tend not to be seen onscreen, and his bloodiest shocks are typically comically sudden, like Marvin’s infamous Pulp Fiction exit. However, in Rick & Morty's universe, the body count is far higher, and bloody violence is much more commonplace, meaning it would be impossible to transfer Tarantino’s successful approach to a live-action version of the series. Almost every episode of Rick & Morty, including its Thanksgiving special, includes intense violence that is hilarious in animation but would be both expensive and potentially hard-to-watch (or at least, hard to laugh at) in live-action.

Rick & Morty Is Too Ambitious

Rick & Morty is an admirably ambitious series, never settling for simplicity when the show can pursue a more complicated or strange approach to each episode’s story. As a result, the scope of the Adult Swim series makes Rick & Morty a show too ambitious for live-action where, even with the assistance of CGI and special effects, stories are inherently limited by what the creators can afford to stage. Rick & Morty’s season 5 finale, for example, saw the series upend its multi-season narrative by killing off countless versions of both title characters, destroying an entire city, and effectively ending a multiverse by taking apart the Central Finite Curve. Even within the medium of animation, the closing scenes were an unexpectedly psychedelic trip wherein time slowed down and sped up, entire alternate universes were destroyed in an instant, and countless versions of realities crashed into one another as the setting of the show was sucked into a black hole.

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Attempting to stage Rick & Morty’s season 5 finale in a live-action series would require a huge budget, an ambitious vision, and, crucially, a self-aware sense of humor to be maintained throughout all the grandeur of the episode’s ending. Despite all of Rick & Morty’s 2001: A Space Odyssey-referencing visuals in the episode’s closing moments, the season 5 finale is a funny, brisk outing that keeps making clever asides and meta-jokes right up until the end credits. It is all but impossible to imagine a live-action series combining the immersive, ambitious sci-fi of Rick & Morty with the show’s loose, offbeat humor, and one or other element of the show would no doubt need to be sacrificed for a live-action adaptation to function.

Rick & Morty’s Hero Is Too Young

Justin Roiland’s voiceover work gives Morty a believably nervy teenage squawk but, particularly in the show’s more risqué moments, it is always reassuring to recall that the actor is over forty in reality. Casting an actual fourteen-year-old to play Morty would make Rick & Morty’s tasteless moments much more uncomfortable, much like a live-action South Park couldn’t pull off the majority of its storylines. Although Jaeden Martell, the actor who portrays Morty in the brief Adult Swim bumpers, is actually 18 in reality, this only opens up another logistical issue for the series. Like most cartoon characters, Rick and Morty have not aged since the series began in 2013, whereas a live-action version of the show would have needed to recast the teen hero at least once if not twice already by season 5. Thus, despite viewer excitement, Rick & Morty needs to contain its live-action ambitions to (hopefully) a one-off episode or another cameo appearance by Lloyd and Martell, rather than an entire spinoff series that switches to the more limited, grounded medium.

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