Rick and Morty Season 8 will break a disappointing streak when its 2025 release finally comes to pass.
The last time fans heard from the hit Adult Swim series was in December 2023, with the release of its seventh season—which received generally favorable reviews but did not quite hit the heights of some of its past seasons.
Season 7 marked the first new episodes of the series without creator Justin Roiland, who was fired from the show thanks to some legal troubles that came to light during development.
Rick and Morty Breaks Frustrating Streak
Rick and Morty Season 8's incoming 2025 release will break a frustrating streak for the franchise.
The new batch of episodes—which have yet to have a specific release window announced—marks the first time the series has taken a year off since Season 4 in 2019.
This comes after the franchise took all of 2024 off in the wake of the Hollywood actors' and writers' strike that shut down the entertainment industry for months in 2023.
In fact, it is this widespread job action that is largely to blame for Season 8 missing 2024, as work was ultimately unable to get started until well into 2024. This led to its inevitable release now coming in 2025.
Since Rick and Morty's debut in 2013, the show only missed two other years with no new episodes being released (2016 and 2018), so missing a year was not entirely unprecedented for the franchise, but that period from 2019 to 2023 is certainly is the longest streak of yearly released the series has had to date.
It is worth noting that this streak only included releases of the mainline show, as 2024 did see the release of its anime spin-off, which ran from August to October last year (read more about the Rick and Morty anime here).
When Will Rick and Morty Season 8 Be Released
Rick and Morty's dry streak of new episodes should come to an end sometime in 2025; however, when exactly that will happen with the debut of Season 8 has not yet been disclosed.
According to the show's executive producer, Steve Levy, Season 8 was "fully written" before the 2023 Hollywood strikes, along with a solid outline of what Season 9 will look like:
"Also, Season 8 is already fully written, and we managed to outline a good part of Season 9 before the writers' strike. So we're already talking about Season 10!"
This means, at least from a writing perspective, the series was in a good place heading into the Hollywood shutdown in 2023. Animation and recording works likely started in early 2024, following the release of Season 7, with production seemingly taking place for much of the last year.
Fans got a brief tease of the season to come from Adult Swim in December 2024, thanks to a short first look teaser, potentially meaning its release could come sooner rather than later.
That first look teaser reconfirmed Rick and Morty Season 8 will be released in 2025.
Despite it ending with a nebulous "coming in 2025" release window, the fact that it exists at all means Adult Swim is priming the pump for Season 8's release in some form.
The first Season 7 trailer was released a mere month-and-change before its eventual release. While more time has elapsed since the Season 8 teaser and that five or six-week window, it likely means a debut for the new episodes may be imminent.
This means fans can likely expect Season 8 of the series to release at least in the first half of 2025, but that is not guaranteed.
Rick and Morty is now streaming on Max.
