Arrested Development Season 4: 5 Fast Facts You Need to Know

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Netflix’s newest season of Arrested Development premieres next month…or so we’re told.
A specific release date has yet to be announced for the fourteen new episodes, but cast members and media sources have provided some insight into the seemingly scant official news about the cult television show.
So, here they are:

1. This Isn’t Officially “Season 4”

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In an interview with GQ mazaine, Jason Bateman was quoted as saying:

“It is not season four,” Bateman says emphatically. “It got misbranded or mislabeled way, way, way back when and was never corrected for one reason or another. There are different agendas at work there, but it is not season four.”

Unfortunately, Bateman did not elaborate as to what he means by that. Just more speculation.

2. David Cross Doesn’t Know if There Will Be a Movie

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In an interview with Michael Cera, David Cross was quoted as saying:

“I don’t know if there’s going to be a movie,” Cross said. “The next season of the show will air, sorry, will stream in May. They were shooting for earlier but that got extended because of editing. So let’s just say early to middle of May. There will be 14 to 15 episodes. There was going to be 10, but then everything got stretched out for your enjoyment. Because why not? At least this time we don’t have to worry about selling jeans on Fox TV.”

3. There Will Be Lots of Guest Stars

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Latino Posts confirms the impressive list of guest stars we can expect to see on this new season, including: Ben Stiller, Seth Rogen, Kristen Wiig, Isla Fisher, Conan O’Brien and John Slattery, not to mention a brief cameo from the show’s creators Mitch Hurwitz and Brian Grazer.

4. Jason Bateman Talks About a Possible Movie

arrested development season 4

Further along in his interview with GQ, Bateman touches on the seeming need for a movie to follow-up this supposed last season.

The last line of the last episode of Arrested Development was Ron Howard saying to Maeby—she’s pitching him a show about her family at Imagine—and he says to her, “No, I don’t see it as a series. Maybe a movie!” And then the screen goes black. That’s it. So Mitch [Hurwitz, the show’s creator] was always planning on writing a movie. Every time he went to start a movie script, there was so much work to be done just to fill the audience in on where the family had been since the end of the show, and to also initiate the uninitiated about who these characters are. So he thought: The only way to tell a story of this size is to do the first act in episodes. So it’s really a hybrid distribution of one big story. The episodes are simply act 1, and the movie will have act 2 and act 3 in it. So one does not work without the other.

5. This Will Probably Be the Last “Season”

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It has been reported via the Huffington Post that this will most likely be the end of the series.

On a conference call with investors on Monday, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings said “Arrested Development’s” revival on the streaming service happened under “unrepeatable circumstances,” according to The Hollywood Reporter.

“‘Arrested’ is a unique property. We don’t anticipate being able to do Season 5, 6 and 7,” Hastings said on the call (via THR). “It is really a fantastic one off, which is coming together incredibly. I think it will be amazing for us, but think of it as a non-repeatable amazing.”