One of my frustrations with the fourth season of Arrested Development was the amount of cliffhangers. It demands at the very least a movie, and the movie doesn't have a green light. However, creator Mitch Hurwitz is hard at work on the film script, but in an interview with Rolling Stone, he cautions, "I can't get into much more detail because I don't want to scare anybody off. I don't want to be presumptuous about it. I don't own the property outright – it's a 20th Century Fox property. But everybody seems really into it and really eager to make a movie." I'm also wondering how 20th Century Fox will work with Netflix. Netflix was able to get clips from the first three seasons (with a fun running gag implying that the clips were ripped from DVDs), so I assume Netflix will be willing to provide clips from season four.
Hit the jump for more.
Hurwitz didn't want to go into more details regarding his plans for the future of Arrested Development, explaining:
"But I want to be very careful about not putting out false information. I want to get a time and tell everybody when it's happening and not play with people. Right now, I'm trying to do something else for Netflix and a movie project and things. I'm always sort of superstitious about talking about this stuff before it happens. It's the best way to guarantee it doesn't happen."
One of the other concerns is getting the cast back together, but Hurwitz believes it will be much easier reuniting them for a movie than it was for the fourth season. "A TV season is a six-month commitment," he tells Rolling Stone. "But I think it would be very doable to get them together for four or five weeks to make a movie." Despite the difficulties in getting everyone back for season four, which made heavy use of body-doubles, Hurwitz is also hoping to follow the movie with a fifth season. "It's always been its own little thing. I kind of feel like the more it stays original, the better chance it has," he says. "As soon as it goes back to trying to do exactly what it was before, you run the risk of doing a reunion show or something." It's a strange comment considering that the fourth season almost reveled in the one scene where the entire cast was physically together in one room.
Hurwitz also responded to criticisms of the fourth season. He believed that initial criticisms came from evaluating the show based on the first few episodes rather than seeing them as part of a whole narrative:
"By now, many people have gone through the episodes again," says Hurwitz. "They see the first episodes as the first chapters as opposed to the first episodes. People responding quickly to the first episodes was akin to reading a couple chapters of a book and saying, 'I don't like this.'"
He continued to say that the radical new form of the show was probably off-putting to viewers who expected more of what they had loved from the first three seasons. Hurwitz makes comparisons of season four to Radiohead's Kid A and Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather: Part II, not in terms of quality, but to make the point that the new release confounded and upset those who enjoyed OK Computer and The Godfather.
I know I'll be re-watching season four if and when the movie comes along. Perhaps then I'll come around to Hurwitz' way of thinking.