It’s a Holy Moly exclusive, and one we’re going to have to work very hard to stretch the word count of, but actor Jason Bateman has confirmed to Holy Moly that the long-awaited Arrested Development film will begin shooting next year.

And when we say exclusive, there’s a good chance he told the 20 other people who interviewed him today the same thing. But we’re claiming it.

In town to promote his new, and actually really funny body-swap movie, The Change-Up, we took a gamble in asking Bateman about Arrested Development because we imagine he’s pretty ruddy sick of talking about it.

Thankfully, he’s a very nice man. And so told us that while he couldn’t say absolutely for certain, he was pretty sure production on the Arrested Development film would begin in “the middle of next year”.

Sorry that’s not a longer quote but we haven’t got the tapes back yet and we wouldn’t want to misquote him. (He also told us that, in America, the classification system makes it easy to tell if a film has boobs in it).

Anticipation about the Arrested Development movie first began after it was hinted at the very end of the final episode of the US sitcom. But despite series creator Mitchell Hurwitz and executive producer Ron Howard beginning pre-production as early as 2008, work on the film has been continually postponed, mainly due to Michael Cera being in all films ever.