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| Image credit: BBC |
The BBC’s long-running sci-fi TV series Doctor Who is to be transformed into a big screen franchise according to Variety, with Harry Potter director David Yates set to helm the first instalment.
For those unfamiliar with the hugely popular British TV series, Variety describes Doctor Who as being about “the adventures across space and time of a super-intelligent alien in human form, who battles a variety of cosmic bad guys aided by plucky human companions,” noting that “the series ran from 1963 to 1989, and then was successfully rebooted in 2005 by writer Russell T. Davies and subsequently by Steven Moffat (The Adventures of Tintin)." The series has also consistently and - often overtly - tapped into UFOlogical literature and debate.
Yates is developing the Doctor Who movie with Jane Tranter - head of BBC Worldwide Prods. - but fans of ‘The Doctor’ will have to be patient as the movie is currently without a writer and so is unlikely to grace cinema screens any time soon. “We're going to spend two to three years to get it right," Yates told Variety, "It needs quite a radical transformation to take it into the bigger arena."
Doctor Who fans may also be peeved at the fact that the movie will have little in common with its small screen counterpart. According to Variety, “Yates made clear that his movie adaptation would not follow on from the current TV series, but would take a completely fresh approach to the material.” Yates said that he would be moving away from Doctor Who as imagined by Russell T. Davies and Steven Moffat: “We have to put that aside and start from scratch."
It should be noted that two Doctor Who films were produced in the 1960s, both of which starred Peter Cushing: Doctor Who and the Daleks (1965) and Doctor Who: Daleks' Invasion Earth 2150 A.D. (1966). However, as Variety points out, this new project is “the most high-powered effort to date to launch Doctor Who onto the big screen.”
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