'Arrested Development' Season 5 Could Premiere After A Movie, Mitch Hurwitz Says

After “Arrested Development” was canceled by Fox in 2006, fans and cast members alike hoped for the cult sitcom to reappear as a movie. Instead, it was revived by Netflix for a 15-episode fourth season earlier this year. The revival was a huge success, and it’s almost a guarantee that fans will see more “Arrested Development” before too long in the form of the movie they’ve always wanted.

According to a Rolling Stone interview, series creator and executive producer Mitch Hurwitz is hard at work writing the script for an “Arrested Development” movie. He says he’d like to tie up season four’s loose ends with the movie before launching into another Netflix-exclusive season.

As it stands, Hurwitz appears to be writing the “Arrested Development” movie script on spec, hoping to receive a green light from 20^th Century Fox soon after he finishes a draft.

“I’m working on the movie right now. I can’t get into much more detail because I don’t want to scare anybody off,” Hurwitz said. “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."

One big benefit to shooting the next iteration of “Arrested Development” as a movie? Getting all the stars in one place.

The show’s stars -- Jason Bateman, Michael Cera, Tony Hale, Portia de Rossi and others -- have all gone on to bigger, more high-profile careers since “Arrested Development” first ended. Some, like Hale, are under strict contracts from other TV series and would have to work around already-planned schedules.

The logistics of getting all of these people together again are daunting, and it’s what made the show’s fourth season filming so difficult. As a result, the new season featured very few scenes of the entire original cast together, instead opting to focus each episode on an individual character. As Hurwitz explains, getting the cast together for a movie would be much easier, allowing a return to the large ensemble that many fans enjoyed throughout the first three seasons.

“A TV season is a six-month commitment. But I think it would be very doable to get them together for four or five weeks to make a movie,” he said.

Despite all the hard work Hurwitz is putting in for a possible “Arrested Development” movie, he says it’s still too early for an official announcement. Still, it wouldn’t be too out of the line to expect something to happen before long.

“I’m hoping it happens as soon as possible. But I want to be very careful about not putting out false information,” Hurwitz said. “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.”