Last week at the New Yorker Festival, Mitchell Hurwitz, creator of the show “Arrested Development” and the entire cast of the show, announced to the world that they were finally filming the long-awaited movie this summer. And on top of this, they’re also filming a ten-episode fourth season to air on television right before the movie is released. A tweet later that same day from star Jason Bateman perfectly sums it up:

“It’s true. We will do 10 episodes and the movie. Probably shoot them all together next summer for a release in early ’13. VERY excited!”

The show was never too popular when it was on the air, but ever since it was cancelled, it has gained an enormous fan base that reaches all crevices of the world. One of these crevices is Mariemont, where a number of students have discovered the show and have been drawn together as a result.

“We started watching it when we were freshmen,” states Gorman. “I mostly watched it on Hulu, getting through a season a week while school was going on.”

The series ran for two, twenty-plus episode seasons, and a third thirteen-episode season. Rolander also admits to getting through the series in just three weeks.

“At one point we actually started racing to see who could finish faster,” explains Fries.

When the three of them discovered the rumors of the Arrested Development movie, they decided to try to help the cause.

“We started talking about making a Facebook group,” states Fries. They did finally make the group, titled “Confident Men (#2): 100,000 Strong for the Arrested Development Movie.” The name of the group–a play on a joke from the series–reflected the group’s confidence that the creators of show were smart enough to actually make the film, according to the group’s “About” page.

“It was an epic failure,” admits Rolander. He is referencing the group’s inability to reach it’s lofty goals.

“It got up to a hefty number of 200 members,” states Fries.

“But we did have representatives from Brazil, Virginia, Illinois, and Indiana, so somehow it caught on a little bit,” states Gorman. Fries joked about the group’s lack of influence.

“Today I think it was our doing that got the movie to come about.” Last week, the Facebook group sent out a message to all of its users for the first time in two years. The message read as follows:

“We did it. It was us. Congrats everybody.”

“Arrested Development” is a show that ran on FOX for three seasons from 2003-2006. The show chronicles a rich family that owns a housing company.  The son of the family has to keep them together when their dad is arrested and the company goes bankrupt.

The show paved the way for the careers of many current stars including Jason Bateman, Michael Cera, Will Arnett, Portia de Rossi, Tony Hale, David Cross, while also starring such veterans as Jeffrey Tambour, Jessica Walter, and Ron Howard as the narrator. In the series finale of the show, they hint at the fact that they would make a movie based on the show.

The show is still garnering new Mariemont fans to this day. This past August, senior Bryan Routt and sophomore Cole Stewart started to watch the show.

“I had heard a lot of people talking about it but had never really gotten around to seeing it,” explains Routt. The two of them were also quick to finish watching the series.  Stewart adds that it only took somewhere between three weeks and a month.

“It’s just so entertaining,” states Stewart. “There wasn’t one episode where I did not laugh hysterically.”

The two of them admit it was hard to join in on the show so late, they said.  But doing it together helped.

“I felt good that Routt was getting ‘on the train’ at the same time as me,” expresses Stewart. “It was fun to go through it with someone else.”

While certain students may have caught on to the show at different times, they will all be united when they go to see the film. Most everyone stated that they’d be going to a midnight premiere.

“Definite midnight premiere,” states Fries. “Maybe I’ll paint myself blue, for Tobias,” referencing yet another inside joke from the series.

“It’ll be interesting to see how they deal with the huge time lapse,” states Routt. “But it should be very good.”