This Is What the Unproduced ‘Arrested Development’ Movie Was About
Back before the show spluttered to a halt with its less-than-satisfying fifth season, there was a lot of talk about a potential Arrested Development movie. And now Jason Bateman has revealed new details about what that may have looked like.
When the show was canceled by Fox in 2007, streaming TV series didn’t exist. The only potential future for the Bluth family was to make the leap to the big screen, or so it seemed at the time. The final moments of the (first) series finale made an unsubtle meta-joke about that apparent strategy, with Maeby pitching a TV show about her family to Ron Howard, who tells her, “I don’t see it as a series. Maybe a movie…”
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In 2011, Bateman told NPR’s Wait Wait...Don't Tell Me! that the rumored cinematic continuation of Arrested Development was “moving along quite nicely.” But just two years later, instead of a feature film, we got a fourth season of the series on Netflix.
The ambitious, yet wildly clunky, season wasn’t intended to be a substitute for the movie. In fact, it was just the opposite. According to creator Mitch Hurwitz, his original pitch to Netflix was to produce “little webisodes about each character” to tee-up the planned movie. But when the press flipped out over the news that Arrested Development was back, he opted to expand the series, even though the actors’ schedules were severely limited.
In 2013, Hurwitz still claimed that an Arrested Development feature was “definitely the next step” clarifying that Season Four was “designed with a movie in mind.” He also hoped to make it with Netflix, and somehow convince them to let it play in theaters first. Later that year, Hurwitz told Vulture that his “goal is to do a kind of movie-for-Netflix type thing, and then go into (another) series.”
Obviously the movie never got made, but the fifth season hit Netflix five years later. Hurwitz had previously told interviewers that the movie was going to be about the Bluths reuniting for Buster’s murder trial, a plot point that ended up being used for the underwhelming final installment of the series.
Bateman recently guested on Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend and revealed some new information about the unproduced project. “We almost did the movie for a long time,” Bateman recalled. He went on to describe how Arrested Development fan Matt Damon approached him at the Golden Globes and asked about the movie, specifically requesting: “Can I do you? Can I play (you)?” This prompted Bateman to tell Hurwitz: “This thing is moving.”
“Wait a minute, why can’t you be you?” Conan questioned. “I love that there’d be an Arrested Development movie, and all of you would be recast with real actors.”
Bateman explained that one of the core concepts of the movie was to have it be about movie-within-a-movie. “The story of the Arrested Development movie would be that, in the show, Hollywood wanted to make a movie about us. And we certainly couldn’t play ourselves because we’re not actors. Michael Bluth would be on set watching Matt Damon play Michael Bluth and be so excited.” But David Cross’ Tobias would play himself in the movie “because he was an actor.”
“I think (Will) Arnett was pretty close to getting (Will) Ferrell to play Gob. And it would’ve been pretty cool,” Bateman added. This plot point, too, was seemingly recycled for Season Five, albeit in a less-star-studded, far more affordable way. Instead of a movie, Ron Howard’s Bluth project ultimately became a true-crime documentary.
When O’Brien told Bateman that the movie could “still happen,” the actor didn’t hesitate before firing back with: “No, I don’t think anybody gives a shit.”
It’s unclear if he was referring to the fans or the cast.
