With news that Justin Roiland has been charged with domestic violence in Orange County, several questions remain unanswered about the fate of his sprawling animation empire.
As NBC News first reported on Jan. 12, Roiland, the co-creator of Adult Swim and Hulu’s Solar Opposites’ Rick and Morty, was charged in 2020 with assault and false imprisonment following an alleged incident in that year with an unnamed woman that Roiland was dating. After Roiland was released on $50,000 bail in 2020, several pretrial hearings were held in the case, including one on Thursday. (Roiland has pleaded not guilty, and in a statement, Roiland’s attorney, T. Edward Welbourn, called media coverage of the charges “inaccurate,” adding, “To be clear, Not only is Justin innocent, but we have.” any expectation that this is the case is well on the way to being dismissed once prosecutors have completed their methodical review of the evidence.
Though Rick and Morty distributor Adult Swim has so far declined to comment on the news, the show isn’t even halfway through a 70-episode order the network commissioned in 2018. In addition to his role as co-creator and executive producer on the cult adult animated series, Roiland voices the series’ title Rick and Morty. The series is consistently the most watched on Adult Swim; The recently completed sixth season averaged 560,000 viewers when it first aired, with significant gains from delayed viewing and streaming. The success of Rick and Morty spawned a short spinoff series (Vindicators 2, which Roiland executive produced) and a comic book series. In 2022, Adult Swim also announced an anime spinoff directed by Takashi Sano.
Beyond Adult Swim, Hulu has invested heavily in Roiland productions. As with Rick and Morty, Roiland plays a main character in Solar Opposites, the Hulu show he co-created with Mike McMahan about aliens in America’s suburbs. Three seasons have aired to date, and it has been renewed with a fifth season on the Disney-operated streamer. Roiland is also executive producer and voice actor for Koala Man, a Hulu comedy series that debuted Monday. Hulu did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
Disney’s 20th television animation produces both Solar Opposites and Koala Man; Roiland also has an overall contract with the studio. 20. TV had no comment when reached by THR.
In 2016, Roiland co-founded a video game developer called Squanchtendo (“Squanch” refers to the name of a planet on Rick and Morty) with Tanya Watson, former CEO of Epic Games. Roiland now leads the company, currently called Squanch Games, as CEO with offices in Burbank, California and Raleigh, North Carolina. Its latest title, first-person shooter High on Life, released to stunning sales on December 13 and enjoyed the biggest launch on Xbox Game Pass of 2022 and the biggest third-party launch on the platform ever. He also released an NFT art collection in 2021 and hosted an art exhibition at UTA Artist Space in December (he is a client of the agency). Squanch Games did not respond to a request for comment.
Roiland is expected for another pre-trial hearing in Orange County on April 27.