It's hardly experienced the development hell of "Monkey Tennis", but after seven years of waiting the Alan Partridge movie seems finally to be making its way to the big screen.

Partridge co-writer Armando Iannucci has told Empire magazine that filming on the feature-length adventure will start this year, with Steve Coogan returning as Norfolk's favourite son. "It's just about all come together now," Iannucci said. "[The script] is written [but] we're always rewriting, rewriting and rewriting." Iannucci followed up the interview by tweeting: "Mr Alan P is going cinemasurroundsound".

Declan Lowney, the Irish director of sitcom Father Ted, will film a script that has been worked on by Iannucci, Coogan, Neil Gibbons and Rob Gibbons (writers on the Fosters funny series Mid-Morning Matters and the fictional biography I, Partridge). Peter Baynham, co-writer of Sacha Baron Cohen's Brüno movie, worked on an earlier draft.

Unlike Baron Cohen's creation it's unlikely that Alan will make the trip to the big ol' US of A, opting instead to stick to the convenient service stations and competitively-priced hotel chains of Norwich. "We don't see Alan, for example getting Simon Cowell's spot on American Idol and going over there," Coogan told the Playlist last year. "That's too good for Alan. [His] future is always brighter in his head than it is in the real world."

And on that bombshell … we await The Alan Partridge movie, which should be hitting cinemas in 2013.

• This article was amended on 1 May 2012. We omitted Neil Gibbons and Rob Gibbons from the list of scriptwriters attached to The Alan Partridge Movie. This has been corrected.