Arrested Development Full-Length Film to Be Released Next Year?

When Arrested Development went off the air in 2006, its devoted fan base was crushed, but in the finale of the third season, there was a glimmer of hope. In the final scene of the last episode, Maebe Fünke pitches Ron Howard a TV show about the Bluth Family, and he replies, “I don’t see it as a series… maybe a movie.” Since that teaser, there have been many announcements and many setbacks regarding the film. On July 11, during an episode of WTF with Marc Maron, Will Arnett, who played Gob Bluth in the series, claimed that the film was in the works and that it should be in theaters next year.

On Maron’s show, Arnett expressed his disappointment at the show’s cancellation:

“It was a bit of a bummer. We felt like we were making something. When we first started, we didn’t know what the hell we were doing, but then once we got going, it was fun, and the writing was really really good, and we were just blessed every week… It was a bummer. You were working with people, and you felt like you were doing something really great, and then they just tell you you’re done, and you’re like, ‘wait, what did we do wrong?'”

Arnett went on to confirm that the film is in progress:

“We are gonna make the Arrested Development movie, and Mitch Hurwitz, who is really just a brilliant brilliant guy, is in the process of concocting something unexpected, and I don’t want to give that away… If all goes well, I think it’s going to be something that’s going to be really satisfying for people who’re fans of the show; they just want to see the characters kind of back and interacting, and he’s kind of come up with a cool way to do that.”

This isn’t the first time that rumors have circulated about the film — Hurwitz has been working on the script since 2008. All we can do is hope that he truly is near completion this time. In the meantime, we’ll have to content ourselves with reliving classic moments and discovering all the jokes we missed the first time around.

[via Mashable]