The reason FOX’s brilliant comedy sitcom “Arrested Development” went off the air is because it was a more intelligent style of humor and because it took some investment. Oh, and because it received poor ratings despite raving reviews. This wasn’t a show that people could sit down and watch once and get hooked, you needed to spend time with the characters and the humor came out of almost becoming a part of the dysfunctional Bluth family.
The show starred Jason Bateman, Jeffrey Tambor and the now popular Michael Cera, and word out of E! Online is that the long rumored motion picture based on the show may actually still be in development.
Bateman told E!’s gossip monger Kristin Dos Santos that the creative minds behind “Arrested Development” (Mitch Hurwitz and Ron Howard) have put the wheels in motion toward a major motion picture of the Fox TV comedy. She was told by an industry insider that Jason and other Bluth family members have received calls from the producers asking if they would be willing to shoot a movie.
“I can confirm that a round of sniffing has started,” Bateman told E! “Any talk is targeting a post-strike situation, of course. I think, as always, that it’s a question of whether the people with the money are willing to give our leader, Mitch Hurwitz, what he deserves for his participation. And I can speak for the cast when I say our fingers are crossed.”
Word is that while Hurwitz does not have a script yet, he has a good, solid understanding of what he’d like to do for the movie, and Universal is very much interested.
The question remains, is there enough interest for the film to be made?
Obviously, fans of the show are praying it gets made as well as they are upset that it ever got canceled and wasn’t picked up by Showtime or HBO, but is there enough interest in the minds of those that never gave the show a chance to actually check out the movie? Based on the box-office performance of Universal’s Serenity, which was based on the canceled sci-fi series “Firefly”, it is a tough task to pull off. I personally loved Serenity, as did most of the people that saw it, it’s a matter of getting everyone else into the theater that is the problem.
