After years of frustratingly vague promises and false starts, the Arrested Development movie is finally getting made—as a plotline on the Arrested Development TV show. Talking to TV Guide’s Will Keck in an affable voice that pushes the plot along, Ron Howard says the upcoming fourth season will make good on the last episode’s final lines of dialogue, when Howard, playing himself, says, “I don’t see it as a series. Maybe a movie,” kicking off seven years of anticipation for a film he’s finally ready to pretend to make. “In the new season, we create a heightened version of Imagine Entertainment,” Howard says of his real-life production company with Brian Grazer, who added, “We talk about what could be our new Da Vinci Code”—a nod to how the Arrested Development movie has involved its own complex series of clues and a certain amount of self-flagellation.
Anyway, as with all news about an Arrested Development movie—real or fake—the details stop there, though Jason Bateman does add that one episode finds him getting stuck in an elevator with Howard and Grazer, about which Howard says, “It has a lot to do with our inflated egos.” But presumably they survive both their elevator and personality crises, and eventually they make an Arrested Development movie that the fake people in the TV world will all love, just to rub it in even more.