Inside Rick and Morty Season 8’s secret Snyder-Gunn crossover: “People already know?”

In Rick and Morty Season 8, Episode 7, titled Ricker Than Fiction, creators James Gunn and Zack Snyder make surprise voice cameos, playing exaggerated versions of themselves in a hilariously meta takedown of blockbuster filmmaking. The episode focuses on Rick and Morty getting fed up with the creative direction of Maximum Velocitree, a fictional movie franchise, a parody of Fast and Furious. Their frustration then led them to Warner Bros. and a meeting with James Gunn. He is framed as the episode villain, a symbol of studio-driven, creatively stifled storytelling.

While speaking with Variety, Rick and Morty executive producer Scott Marder said that including Gunn and Snyder seemed like a good choice to them.

"We had people on our production side who were like, ‘How is it that James Gunn and Zaslav and all these people already know about this episode?’ We didn’t think it would actually move this quickly."

Therefore, the team thought that if they were doing the parody of big studios, they needed to include their own bosses, Warner Bros., and despite being in the middle of shooting Superman, Gunn responded immediately with a yes when Rob Schrab reached out.

How Snyder and Gunn became part of Rick and Morty Season 8

"Movie-lizer" was an idea that was in the minds of the writers for a long time, showcasing a sci-fi device that lets Rick rewrite the franchise, turning the plots to reflect the character's own ego and desires. Therefore, the team came up with an idea to include their own bosses as characters representing big studios. Executive producer Scott Marder later revealed that both Gunn and Snyder were completely on board with the satire.

“We were like, if we’re going to do a movie and we’re going skewer Hollywood, we feel like we have to include our bosses. So we started thinking about Warner Bros. Who’d be a good face to be kind of the villain here? James Gunn just seemed like such a good choice. We were all pretty sure that whenever Schrab reached out Gunn he would be a million percent in the middle of doing ‘Superman’. But he not only did he respond instantly with a yes, but I think he ran it up the chain at Warner Bros. that same day."

Ultimately, the episode is a brilliant self-aware roast of both fandom entitlement and the blockbuster industrial complex, heightened by the real-life involvement of two of Hollywood’s biggest genre filmmakers.

According to Marder, Gunn even made time to record his lines the morning after wrapping principal photography on Superman.

“I think Gunn called people over him to make sure that this wasn’t going to mess anything up. And it looked like he got the green light pretty quickly. They both came in and were really good sports. I’m a very proud nerd — I idolize both these guys. They’ve got creative freedom very few people have in Hollywood to take big swings.”

Rick and Morty co-creator Dan Harmon was equally thrilled and was extra conscious writing dialogues for Snyder and Gunn. Gunn and Snyder recorded their parts back-to-back and even snapped a picture together that went viral on social media.

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Rick and Morty Season 8 premiered on May 25, 2025, and the season is scheduled to end on July 27, 2025.

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