Mitch Hurwitz Sign For Feature Directorial Debut, Not An ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT Film

Fans who have been waiting for Arrested Development creator Mitch Hurwitz to bring the darkly comical saga of the Bluth family to the big screen will have to wait a bit longer as the writer/producer has signed on to direct his feature film debut Guinea Pigging.

The Hollywood Reporter is letting us know that the film will be written by Night At The Museum writers Thomas Lennon and Robert Ben Garant who based their story on a 2008 New Yorker article about people who earn a portion of their living serving as test subjects for pharmaceutical companies, medical schools, and hospitals. The trade describes the project as a “sophisticated comedy about a human drug-test subject who volunteers for testing at a pharmaceutical company and experiences unusual side effects.”

(Fun side note: This is how director Robert Rodriguez financed his first film, El mariachi.)

Fox 2000 is financing the film and reportedly agreed to a “hefty seven-figure deal” for the privilege. Hurwitz has some directorial experience courtesy of helming nearly the entire run of the show’s Netflix-produced episodes.

It is far too early to know when the film will be released. With Lennon and Garant not even having started work on the screenplay, it is not like it is going to be in production anytime soon. Hurwitz will probably have time to squeeze in work on the next series of Arrested Development for Netflix before he moves on to this. That would put an Arrested Development film a couple of years into the future at the very least.