Arrested Development creator confirms movie

TV comedy Arrested Development is on its way back, with plans for a movie and a spinoff series announced Sunday in New York.

The critically acclaimed Fox show about the deeply dysfunctional Bluth family lasted just three seasons and went off the air in 2006.

At a Bluth Family Reunion panel at the New Yorker Festival on Sunday, series creator Mitch Hurwitz outlined a TV spinoff series that would devote one episode to each member of the family. He also promised a movie in which the first scene will feature all the characters reunited.

"Just creatively, I have been working on the screenplay for a long time and found that as time went by, there was so much more to the story," he said at the festival.

"In fact, where everyone's been for five years became a big part of the story. So in working on the screenplay, I found even if I just gave five minutes per character to that back story, we were halfway through the movie before the characters got together."

The nine or 10 TV episodes and film could come out in 2013.

Hurwitz said the delay in creating the film, long been rumoured to be in the works, was due to the need to negotiate rights to the Arrested Development story as well as talks with studios. Hurwitz did not say who would produce the series or the film.

He naysayed stories about Canadian Michael Cera, who plays George Michael Bluth, acting as a holdout on the film project, saying that was an "inside joke" that went wrong.

Cera was a guest at the New York panel, along with Jason Bateman, Will Arnett, Portia de Rossi, Tony Hale, David Cross, Jessica Walter, Jeffrey Tambor and Alia Shawkat. Executive producer Ron Howard called in.

The cast shared anecdotes from the shooting, including which lines were ad-libbed and how the 1987 British film Withnail & I inspired the creators.