SI78

It's perfect. He's finally old enough for pop pop.

GreenVulture

Precisely. Just like Serenity, it's a situation where a small but devoted group of fans of a cult show vastly overestimate both their collective worth in terms of ticket sales and the show's box office appeal to mass audiences.

Go tell that to the makers of Strangers With Candy: The Movie.

NiCK Crush

Michael Cera looks younger than he is anyway.

-NiCK

majorjoe23

That and it's not like they need to be playing the same age as when the show ended. A few years could have passed, allowing them to set up new comic situations.

tylergfoster

At least you could probably drag your friends to an Arrested Development movie without them worrying that you were taking them into a nerd war zone.

And Strangers With Candy was more eccentric than Arrested Development. If someone said they were making a Stella movie I would be more than ready to concede that it would just baffle and aggravate audiences.

For the record, however, I think AD should be a straight-to-DVD movie. Perhaps they can even drum up a very limited, roadshow style theatrical run for the diehards.

GreenVulture

I was just trying to point out that beloved cult comedies don't always translate into box office gold, like Strangers with Candy. Or Reno 911!. Or Aqua Teen Hunger Force.

This is probably the best route. I'm a big fan of Development and, despite my beliefs that quality was slipping in the last four or five episodes, would love to see their continued adventures. But a theatrical film seems like a giant waste of marketing dollars...would be better just to bypass theaters and go directly to DVD, where the show made a killing.

Trevor

I think there is a bit of a difference between the two. AD was on a major network for 3 years, has stars with name recognition, great reviews, and will be at least slightly familiar to J6P.

SwC was a tiny show on a tiny network, with no recognizable stars, and is even obscure to people like us. J6P had no reference.

jdpatri

The fact that you're calling it pop pop tells me you're not ready for this movie.

DVD Josh

Very well played

jdpatri

Much appreciated.

Merkin Muffley

Getting to see Arrested Development in a theater? What a fun, sexy time for us.

Trevor

Very well indeed. Jdpatri has the post of the week so far!

Drexl

Yeah, they'd know Tobias from Alvin and the Chipmunks.

Unfortunately, they won't be learning any important lessons in the movie. Steve Ryan, who played the one-armed man, died about six months ago.

Peep

Yeah, but AD was known as that show that nobody watched - and that was when it was free!

Trelach24

So.....what's the all time record for box office drop-off in a week?

NiCK Crush

it was hilarious when curse words were beeped on the tv show... i wonder if they would choose to have the swearing or not...

-NiCK

SoSpacey

a la Action!

reverie

I have to agree with the "Serenity" comparisons. I *love* both shows, and had higher box office expectations for "Serenity", but reality came crushing down. I'll take al;l the AD I can get, but the only thing the movie would have going for it are the 'star' names, and I'm not sure that'd be enough for a studio blockbuster.

slop101

FWIW, I know a lot of people that have come around and become huge fans of AD on dvd since the show's gone off air. Much, much more so than in the case of Firefly/Serenity. Add to that the fact that an AD movie will have more recognizable names and a smaller budget, and you could have a decent hit on your hands - especially when it comes out on dvd.

NiCK Crush

not following?

-NiCK

jdpatri

Additionally, AD has the possibility to use story-related gratuitous cameo-power. Think of some of the movie and TV stars they brought in just for an episode or two... Zach Braff, Tom Jane, Charlize Theron, Ben Stiller, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, James Lipton, Ione Skye (famous to some of us, I suppose), Dave Atell, etc. It wouldn't be out of character to bring a big name in for a scene or two. It's Ron Howard. Everybody loves Ron Howard. Toss a Tom Hanksian name into the trailer and even people who don't know anything about AD are at least going to take notice. Plus you've got all the Paul Feig and Jay Chandrasekhar connections. There were a lot of people that loved Firefly, but the average person watching the previews for Serenity probably just thought that the one guy looked like Wat from Knight's Tale and filed it away in the folder for movies they might watch someday... when it comes on cable. (Hell, while we're at it, bring back the Veals so Alan Tudyk can be in this one too.) Anyway, I'm not saying it's going to be an easy sell, but star recognition goes a long way towards pushing a "cult phenomenon" towards the mainstream. When AD first started, they had a name in Jason Bateman (and even he had been borderline forgotten) and that was about it. Now, because of Superbad and Juno, Michael Cera's become quite a teenage altpop icon. And those teenage altpoppers certainly have an impact on the box office. I dunno. That's a lot of rambling to say that I think this is really a different kind of case than Firefly.

GreenVulture

Walk Hard was a recent cameo-heavy comedy, and to a lesser extent, so was Strangers with Candy; both failed at the box office.

The fact of the matter is, movies based on TV shows are a risky proposition at best. In order for them to succeed, I think the show has to be a cultural phenomenon--like The X-Files, The Simpsons, Star Trek--something that is so popular and recognizable that even people who rarely watch TV are aware of what the show is and have a general understanding of it. I can't think of many exceptions to this rule.

slop101

It can't be any more risky than any number of new movies with zero recognition at all.

Hell, even the Aqua Teen Hunger Force movie made it's money back - of course it had a non-existent budget, but still...

majorjoe23

I remember one of the issues with AD was the fact that it had a fairly high budget for a sitcom. Shooting in Southern California probably isn't cheap.

The Aqua Teen Hunger Force Movie could have been made with money made from donating plasma. Once.

jdpatri

As has been said Strangers with Candy just isn't that popular. It's not. I only know two people that watched SwC but probably more than thirty that watched AD (And I really don't know that many people.) Plus the movie just looked awful. I watched the show occasionally and had no desire to see the movie. That may have been poor marketing, I wouldn't know. I still haven't seen it. Walk Hard had cameo power, true, but it also didn't have a built-in audience, or a true box-office draw in any of the leads (as I think Michael Cera may be right now in the teen market). And Aqua Teen, hell, I friggin love Aqua Teen, but let's face it, that did as well as anyone could have expected.

I'm not trying to say why AD will succeed -- I have reservations myself -- I'm saying why I think it has a greater likelihood to be more successful than other "cult" TV shows turned movies. I also think it could be said that after Arrested Development went off the air and the DVDs starting selling it attained something more widespread than the narrow niche normally reserved for "cult" status.

Just as one statistic I'm tossing out there, the ratings and vote totals from TV shows on IMDB:

Strangers with Candy: 8.3, 783 votes
Firefly: 9.5, 17,334 votes
Aqua Teen Hunger Force: 8.9, 3,035 votes
Arrested Development: 9.7, 22,005 votes

That is, of course assuming any of this happens in the first place. Our hope for this movie is still based on the hope that there really is an unwritten idea floating around the head of Mitchell Hurwitz.