Arrested Development Confirms Movie, "Mini-Season"

The Bluth family will return in a 9-10 episode mini-season
before their feature film debut.
Click above for the full article on NYT.com

Finally: some news worth reporting. After years of pre-production, followed by years of no-production and various confirmations and swift denials, it finally came directly from the horse's mouth that Arrested Development will indeed be made into a film. The exciting bonus, that I certainly didn't expect, was the announcement of a 9-10 episode "mini-season" that will catch up with the Bluths some years after the events depicted in the Emmy-award winning series.

At an event held at the New Yorker Festival, Mitchell Hurwitz (the show's creator) said, "I have been working on the screenplay for a long time and found that as time went by, there was so much more to the story. In fact, where everyone’s been for five years became a big part of the story. So in working on the screenplay, I found even if I just gave five minutes per character to that back story, we were halfway through the movie before the characters got together," speaking of the future Arrested Development film. He later went on to say that, "We’re basically hoping to do nine or 10 episodes, with almost one character per episode [as a lead up to the film]," and all social networks were bombarded with the palable excitement of the program's dedicated fanbase.


Jason Bateman and other members of the cast, including Michael Cera and Will Arnett, have previously hinted at the possibility of adapting the dysfunctional Bluths from small to large screen. Bateman said today, "...creatively we are all on board and have a very specific plan about how it would come out and what we would do and when we would shoot it," but all were quick to ensure their words were not taken as promises or insinuate a timeline. Hurwitz said, "Perhaps the series is in the fall. This isn’t my decision."

They made certain, however, to dispel the rumors that'd started about Michael Cera's stardom being one of the many sabot in the gears. It seems that Hurwitz had made a few inside-jokeish comments that spiralled into the rumor mill and came out as fact. "I kind of was perpetuating a little thing, like, wouldn’t it be funny if Michael Cera was the holdout. Let’s put that out there. And Michael had that Andy Kaufman thing. And then it really turned ugly, quickly," he said.