A movie version of Fox's cult classic Arrested Development–the best TV series about Orange County ever made (and I'll cut any girl who claims otherwise!)–has been on and off again more often than an electric blender with a short in it.
However, there has been encouraging news lately from an unlikely locale: the red carpet.
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Jeffrey Tambor is the latest to indicate a movie is a go, telling Hollywoodlife.com at the Los Angeles premiere for Disney's Tangled (he voices one of the big-nosed thugs),
“I know there is an idea kind of circulating, but everybody is on board
and probably by next year at this time we'll be in it.”
The 66-year-old actor who played both patriarch George Bluth Sr. and his twin brother Oscar on AD, added he had yet to see a script, although he knows what he'd like to see in it: “I hope both George and Oscar are in it. I just like the
long hair.”
A couple weeks earlier, at the LA premiere for DreamWorks' Megamind, David Cross (a.k.a. Tobias Fünke), countered remarks he'd made as recent as April that, “It's just not going to happen”–the “it” being an AD movie.
First, according to Entertainment Weekly's Pop Watch, Cross jokingly deadpanned, “We shot it secretly on location in the Maldives. It's actually been done for about two years now.”
But when he got serious, Cross disclosed he talked about possible plans for a movie with AD co-star Will Arnett and creator
Mitchell Hurwitz, although–like Tambor–Cross has yet to see a script.
“I know the story they've got in mind, and it's great,” Cross said. “I think it is [a] perfect continuance of the Bluths, although I cannot say anything. I know the outline is done.”
The problem, he said, is finding time. Arnett and Hurwitz are still busy with Fox's Running Wilde, which stars Arnett, was co-created by Hurwitz and features cameos by Cross. (For a better Arnett-Cross pairing, check out IFC's The Increasingly Poor Decisions of Todd Margaret.)
“I am definitely looking forward to it whenever, if ever, it happens,” Cross said.
Fingers crossed.
OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.