'Arrested Development' Will Return to TV For One More Season Before It Comes to the Big Screen, Creator Says

Screenshot (Vimeo)

"Arrested Development" creators found out that waiting FOREEEEEVER five years to bring a TV show to the big screen doesn't just create business problems, it creates a really big creative problem: how do you get the audience caught up on what's happened during all that time?

Like Gob Bluth, the TV show's creator Mitchell Hurwitz has a potentially explosive trick up his sleeve: bringing the show back to TV for one season before it hits the big screen.

Hurwitz said this at the New Yorker Festival this afternoon:

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 the 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.

The plan — tentatively, of course — is to bring the show back for a 9 or 10 episode season and release the movie shortly after that. Hurwitz even shared some ideas for the first episode:

The latest joke we have is that it's Cambridge, Massachusetts, and there's all these scientists in lab coats and they're waiting for somebody. Buster comes through the door in a white lab coat - 'Let's begin' - and they say, 'Oh, no, you don't get to wear the lab coat. We're experimenting on you.'

Oh and the whole thing about how the big hold-up on the movie was Michael Cera and his movie schedule? Hurwitz said that's an inside joke that spun out of control:

I kind of was perpetuating a little thing, like, wouldn't it be funny if Michael Cera was the holdout. Let's put that out there. And Michael had that Andy Kaufman thing. And then it really turned ugly, quickly. So I really just have to say, for those of you that have been following this saga, Michael's always been great.