Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: Mitch Hurwitz says plans for an Arrested Development movie are moving forward, and he’d love for it to be followed by a new season of original episodes on Netflix.
Déjà vu, right?
The latest outlet to pick up the AD ball and run with it is the notoriously unreliable Showbiz 411, which even butchers its facts in this Development report by stating that the movie would lead into “season 3” following the movie. [EDITOR’S NOTE: Roger Friedman went back into his own story to correct his error after it was pointed out in the comments section that season three of Arrested Development already happened.]
But Friedman ran into Hurwitz and actor John Slattery at the Governor’s Ball where he landed this juicy scoop, confirming from the proverbial horse’s mouth that Slattery would return for the film. Slattery played Dr. Norman in multiple episodes of the show’s fourth season. His character, Doctor Norman, is described on the program’s Wikia page as “a drug-addicted disgraced anesthesiologist who befriends Oscar Bluth (Jeffrey Tambor) in the southern Californian desert” who later “tries to give George some medical advice.”
Now, conversation surrounding a fifth season of Arrested Development has been around for a while. We reported on it back in July. And it makes a ton of sense, as the fourth season was successful (by Netflix’s standards) when it was released in its entirety last May.
But the Arrested movie … now that’s a topic that has been around FOREVER. We said, in a 2008 headline, that the movie was “about to happen.” Obviously, it didn’t. We revisited the project every time Hurwitz brought it up. In fact, it became such an issue for the poor Arrested Development stars to handle inquiries from fans and press about a movie that Jason Bateman often had to dance through junkets for other movies answering questions like this:
So take all of this “news” with a grain of salt, as we have been told time and again that the Arrested Development movie was developing (no pun intended), but have yet to see an actual movie on a screen in a theater. To me, it’s kind of like Star Wars: Episode VII. I won’t believe it’s actually happening until I see it on the marquee at a neighborhood multiplex.
