After months and years of being told the time would come, Arrested Development is finally returning, with a ten-episode mini-series and a movie scheduled for a release in 2013.
At the New Yorker Festival Event yesterday, creator Mitchell Hurwitz told audiences that a movie was definitely in the works as well as a new set of television episodes that will catch viewers up on what the characters have been up to for the past five years. (Which is awesome, because the show was cancelled in 2006.)
After being asked for an update on the movie, Hurwitz confirmed they’re “80% of the way to an answer”, and that he and producer/director Ron Howard “had been talking about this for ages and trying to get [it] going”.
He continued: “We don’t completely own the property, there are business people involved and studios and that kind of thing. Just creatively, 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 a 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.”
So with that in mind, he plans on dedicating one episode to each character, thus effectively bringing all of us up to lives of Michael, George Michael, Gob and everyone else we hold dear.
Now only a little more than a year to wait! And while there’d been a joke that it was Michael Cera who was holding up production (thanks to his former days as an indie darling and/or leading man), Horwitz and the gang also ensured it was just that: “So I really just have to say, for those of you that have been following this saga, Michael’s always been great.”
Long live the Bluth empire.
