‘Arrested Development’: Next chapter ready. Anyone buying?

“Arrested Development” creator Mitchell Hurwitz realizes that no matter what he does with his cult comedy, there’s always the suggestion that there’s going to be a next step.

But 10 days after the debut of 15 new “Arrested Development” episodes on Netflix, Hurwitz still isn’t sure where he or the show is going from here.

“My hope was and is that we would do a theatrical movie,” Hurwitz said in a conference call with reporters Wednesday. “This is all complicated by the fact that there are existing rights. (Fox owns the show.) It’s not the kind of thing where we can go out and say Warner Bros. wants it and New Line wants it.”

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Hurwitz says he remains open to making the movie for Netflix, though there have been no discussions along those lines. He also admitted that perhaps the life of a family plays out best episodically, so don’t count out the possibility that the show could return with another season. Actually, from the sound of it, Hurwitz would be happy to embrace just about any format that would have him and the Bluth family.

“Really, whoever wants it,” he said, laughing. “Maybe we could do it as a series of articles. Remember when Woody Allen got turned into a comic strip? I think we should go to the comic strip format.”

He does promise not to spend the next months (years?) speculating about the series’ future in public.

“I don’t have a timeline yet,” Hurwitz said. “We’re going to not do what we did last time, which was to keep saying, ‘It’s coming, it’s coming, it’s coming!’ If there’s more, I promise you, we’ll put a date on it. The last time, it got out of hand.”

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As for the reviews, which have ranged from ecstatic to despairing, Hurwitz maintained a willingness to embrace all points of view.

“Obviously everybody wants to be loved all the time, but it’s not realistic,” he said. “But also it’s certainly not going to be realistic if you’re going to be ambitious in terms of changing the form. There are risks either way. If I had done the exact same show I had done last time, there’d be blowback. There are certain things that you agree with, certain things you grow from, and certain things that you kind of expect if you try something novel. The bad news is I’m going to do it next time, too. I like the idea of playing with the form and finding a new way to get at the themes of the family.”

Hurwitz added that fans will have the chance to see more original content at some point in the future, with Netflix planning to make deleted scenes available. One scene that wasn’t filmed caused Hurwitz a few moments of hesitation before he spilled the beans.

“There was going to be a Mitt Romney joke in the storyline where George Sr. (Jeffrey Tambor) has this land in Mexico… and they were going to be constantly sort of spooked and chased off the land by these really handsome men,” Hurwitz said. “I was going to try to get George Clooney and people like that. And it’s like, ‘Who are these guys? Who are these Mexicans that keep trying to get us off their property?’ And at one point they were going to say, ‘We are the Mexican Romneys!’ Because there’s a whole strain of Mexican Romneys down there from the period in which they were ex-patriots and polygamously marrying. His grandparents started a little camp down there.”

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