What we have here is the rarest of all Oh Don Pianos… one that came true. For some time it’s been de rigeur at press events, bar mitzvahs and secret Bilderberg meetings to ask the cast of Arrested Development if the show might get resurrected as a movie. The answer was always a half-hearted ‘It’s a Mitchell Hurwitz decision, and I’d love to come back if it happened,’ but you could tell that no one thought it would happen. The rumors about a film just will not die, despite David Cross and (the increasingly busy) Michael Cera saying they know nothing about it.
Now there’s been a one-two punch of ‘confirmation.’ While interviewing Jason Bateman about Hancock, the Times of London simply states: ‘A big-screen version of Arrested Development is planned for next year.’ This is not a quote from Bateman, but it prefaces a quote from him describing how the movie would be different from the show (“When it was on TV, if you missed one word the whole third act could be
blown for you. And TV is a different experience. You come home and
you’ve got to finish a call so you miss the first ten minutes or you
get snacky and you go to the fridge and you miss another two minutes,
so it’s a different experience to film.”). This sort of thing is why I like to run transcripts – did they paraphrase Bateman saying there would be a movie next year or is this a case of Oh Don Piano run rampant (possible question from the reporter: “How would an Arrested Development movie differ from the TV show?”)?
But wait, there’s more. According to a commenter on Defamer, Jeffrey Tambor was on Craig Ferguson on Friday and said that the movie was happening. I don’t watch that kind of show, so if anyone can confirm this, I’d be grateful. I should be seeing Tambor this weekend at various Hellboy II events – I’ll grill him on it.
In the meantime, hold on to your DVDs, and your memories.