Finally!
“Arrested Development” fans have long waited for confirmation that the small-screen gem would make it to the big screen, and now, five years after the show came to a premature end, comes the news that both a movie and a TV return are in the works.
“It's true,” lead actor Jason Bateman tweeted Sunday evening. “We will do 10 episodes and the movie. Probably shoot them all together next summer for a release in early '13. VERY excited!”
The buzz first began earlier Sunday when show creator Mitchell Hurwitz told the crowd at the New Yorker Festival that a movie just couldn’t cover everything that the show’s neglected characters needed to convey.
“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,” he said in a quote published to Entertainment Weekly. “In fact, where everyone’s been for five years became a big part of the story. So, in working on the screenplay I found that even if I just gave five minutes per character to that backstory, we were halfway through the movie before the characters got together. And that kind of gave birth to this thing we’ve not been pursuing for a while and we’re kind of going public with a little bit. We’re trying to do kind of a limited-run series into the movie.”
Yes, limited. The television return would only consist of a mini-season which would serve to set up the film by first highlighting each character.
“We’re basically hoping to do nine or 10 episodes with almost one character per episode, where like the first episode will just be Buster,” Hurwitz explained. “We’re kinda picturing it like, um, well the latest joke we have is that, you know, it’s Cambridge, Massachusetts and there’s all these scientists in lab coats and they’re waiting for somebody and Buster comes through the door wearing a lab coat and says `let’s begin,’ and they say, `you don’t get to wear the lab coat, we’re experimenting on you.”
As Bateman tweeted, fans will likely have to wait until 2013 to find out what else is happening with Buster and the rest of the Bluths.
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