Bananas and ice cream sandwiches — if you’re a fan of “Arrested Development” you already know what those things mean to show, and if you don’t, you should be catching up on all three seasons right now before the batch of new episodes hit Netflix next month. All this to say, there are nine new posters for the upcoming not-really-a-season, and with both Jason Bateman and David Cross currently on the interview rounds for their respective indies (“Disconnect” and “It’s A Disaster“), the inevitable question about the potential movie keeps rearing its head.
Of the pair, Bateman tends to be more optimistic, but once again repeats what we’ve been hearing for a while now, that the new episodes are part of a larger picture. “As [creator Mitchell Hurwitz] was writing the movie, it was too big of a story to fit in a 120-page script, so he decided to put the first act in these episodes,” Bateman told I Am Rogue (via Latinos Post). “So acts two and three will be in the movie. One doesn’t really work without the other. They keep saying it’s a new season, but it is actually a bunch of episodes that set up the movie. It asks a bunch of questions that then the movie answers. So it’s kind of a package.”
However, Bateman again reiterates, “The movie is not a done deal yet” adding that, “Unfortunately there is probably going to be a year, maybe a year and a half gap between the two.”
Meanwhile, chatting with Rolling Stone, Cross ponders whether or not a movie of “Arrested Development” would even fit a big screen format. “I don’t know. I still wonder if a movie will work. For personal, selfish reasons, I would love to do a movie,” he said adding, “…the idea of going into a theater and watching the Bluth family on a massive screen, I’m not sure if that experience will work. I think it would be weird and unsettling, but who knows.”
And while it’s still not certain it will even come together, Cross wants “to work with these people for the rest of my life” and says the experience of working at Netflix versus Fox has been night and day. “When we did the show for Fox, we all felt under-appreciated, and you really got the sense that we were a bit of a burden to them. The fact that we won an Emmy was the worst thing in the world – they would have loved to cancel us,” he shared. “The last season, after the fourth or fifth episode, we were going to work everyday wondering, “Is this the week they’re going to cancel us?” We all felt it. But with Netflix, it was just the opposite. They wanted us there. They stayed out of the writer’s room. They stayed off the set.”
And the result? Tune in on May 26th to find out. [IGN/Empire]