Grab a hold of the TARDIS, Doctor Who is heading for the big screen! It’s not just one film we Whovians can look forward to, we’re talking about a whole film franchise being developed. So in a sense, the Doctor will be the next Harry Potter in a manner of speaking.
Variety reports that Harry Potter director David Yates has teamed up with the BBC to adapt this iconic British sci-fi series, whose history spans several decades, to the big screen.
Yates is working with Jane Tranter at BBC Worldwide Productions and they are trying to find the right writers for this project:
“We’re looking at writers now. We’re going to spend two to three years to get it right. It needs quite a radical transformation to take it into the bigger arena.”
So, how are Yates and the BBC going about this big-screen adaptation about the adventures of an eccentric alien Time Lord who calls himself the Doctor that travels through time and space? The questions in your heads as you excitedly read this are most likely these:
- Which Doctor will it be? We are currently on the eleventh version of the regeneratable Doctor with Matt Smith, but there still seems to be a good contingency of fans that prefer the more flamboyant tenth Doctor played by David Tennant.
- Will the storyline follow that of the television show that was re-energized by Russell T. Davies in 2005 and now helmed by Steven Moffat?
Yates explains:
“The notion of the time-travelling Time Lord is such a strong one, because you can express story and drama in any dimension or time.
Russell T. Davies and then Steven Moffat have done their own transformations, which were fantastic, but we have to put that aside and start from scratch.
We want a British sensibility, but having said that, Steve Kloves wrote the Potter films and captured that British sensibility perfectly, so we are looking at American writers too.”
There have been two Doctor Who films thus far: Doctor Who and the Daleks in 1965 and Doctor Who: Dalek’s Invasion Earth 2150 A.D. in 1966, both starring Peter Cushing. Matt Smith stars in the current season of Doctor Who with Karen Gillan and Arthur Darvill as Amy Pond and Rory, her husband, the human companions traveling with the Doctor.
Where and when would you like to see them take the Doctor and his human Companion? Which Doctor and Companion do you want to see? Who do you want to see as the villain?
