Doctor Who Movie in the Works

Two to three years away. Always wondered why this hadn't been done yet.

www.toplessrobot.com/2011/11/uh-oh.php

It's David Yates, who did some of the better Potter movies so it could be worthwhile. The trick is, they really need to go full Hollywood with it- it's got to go far above and beyond BBC movie level. It needs to be like Abram's Star Trek.

The question is, who's the Doctor? That's going to be a BIG FUCKING DEAL. Like, bigger than casting James Bond deal. They really ought to get Tennant back on board, but he's sort of an untried matinee figure.

There have been Doctor Who features in the past- the two Dalek films with Peter Cushing as the Doctor, although not canonical, were sort of attempts to do Who in theaters.

This could be really interesting. They've got their work cut out for them because it's got to introduce everything about Doctor Who in 2-2 1/2 hours and provide a good first story for a franchise.

With a bigger budget...hmm...possibilities are endless. Might we see the Time War or more of Gallifrey?

Yates is the key. A good director can make it happen in a good way rather than it being a travesty.

The article writer seems to think it's a bad idea to do something totally new with the character and the story but I don't think so. There is something, and I don't know what, that has kept The Doctor from ever really hitting in big in the states. That needs to be identified and altered while hopefully maintaining enough of the core to keep established fans interested.

And I hope the make the antagonist The Master. Always my favorite villain.

repoman wrote: Always wondered why this hadn't been done yet.

There's been two Doctor Who movies and both of them were pretty bad. They come along about once every 25 years. Cushing was ok. The most recent one -- Paul McGann maybe? was utter tripe.

repoman wrote: There is something, and I don't know what, that has kept The Doctor from ever really hitting in big in the states.

What part of the states are you living in? Doctor Who was one big-ass draw in Pennsylvania and Delaware when I lived in both of those states in spite of the cheesy-ass production quality of the show. New episodes on PBS were excuses for parties. The show had a major cult following through the 70s and 80s. In fact it only lasted as long as it did in Britain because it was pulling so much revenue from foreign markets. The UK had given up on it but BBC was getting a steady income from overseas.

Barnes wrote: The trick is, they really need to go full Hollywood with it- it's got to go far above and beyond BBC movie level.

The most recent Who movie went "full Hollywood" and it was positively awful. Doctor Who with car chases. It was supposed to be a series of films for TV but thankfully died a quiet death after the first airing of the first film. In spite of my age at the time I remember thinking that they should have just left the damn thing alone.

The best thing they could do this time, (short of just leaving the damn thing alone) would be to stay the course and stay away from shit like the time wars and more Gallifrey. Yech. Gallifrey episodes always sucked. If it's produced in the U.S. they're going to cast Keanu Reeves or Ashton Kutcher as the Doctor and it's going to really blow. This is a bunch of guys looking at a pile of money and trying to figure out the shortest, easiest way to grab it and get out of town. They'll film the explosions first and then work a storyline around them.

S.

Absolutly pointless. What will the movie format bring?
Can't be more epic as you will have LESS time to tell a story!
Live action? That's what the show is.
Bigger? How can you get 'bigger' than storylines involving the end of time and shit, which is already covered.
A gamechanging event like Doc's origins or the time war? Terrible ideas.

There is absolutly no where to go with a film.

repoman wrote: There is something, and I don't know what, that has kept The Doctor from ever really hitting in big in the states. That needs to be identified and altered while hopefully maintaining enough of the core to keep established fans interested.

I assume by 'hitting it big' you mean, as Sag pointed out, mainstream audiences beyond cult status? Then that's easy.

1. It looks cheap. I tried an episode or two back when I was little (Tom Baker) and remember thinking how silly everything looked. And I was seven. The reboot doesn't do much better when you consider modern audiences. (And how could you do a reboot without redesigning the Daleks from the ground up? They're ridiculous. Embarrassing-to-show-to-a-normal-girl ridiculous.)

2. Fellow Anglophiles may forgive this, but the show is SUPER British. It oozes it from every pore, sometimes in a good way (The Empty Child), sometimes not (The Christmas Invasion). Subtle digs at Americans won't help. And Rose and Ecclestone swallow so many consonants that sometimes, if there's action going on, even I have to throw on the subtitles.

3. The pacing is too often wrong, especially during the action sequences. Not the majority, but enough to matter. The first Slitheen transformation stands out: three minutes of watching lights flash in horrified faces. ZZZZZZZZZZZ

4. First season was pretty weak. It didn't know what it wanted to be, a strange blend of goofy and dark that could have worked with better writers (ie. Moffat, vis. The Empty Child) but otherwise jerks the viewer around too much.

I've only started season 2, so it may become more mainstream-palatable. But there's no way what I've seen so far would ever appeal to a North American audience, and you don't usually have that long to find an audience on NA television. (A show like ST:TNG could be forgiven long enough to find its legs, but that's because it had history, and anyway, it was the late 80s.)

If you want to change/update something to appeal to modern mainstream audiences, then the new Star Trek movie is pretty much your template.

As previous posters have pointed out, there are two basic ways to go here: one is a sort of canonical treatment with accommodations to nonfans, which is the route the BBC/FOX movie took in the mid-90s, and then there's the screw-it-it's-a-guy-with-a-time-machine approach a la the Peter Cushing films. The first Cushing film--haven't seen the other--is pretty good if you can get past the fact that the character is called "Doctor Who" and is human. I don't mind the BBC/FOX film, and it's since been more or less adopted into canon, but I'm just as glad they didn't go the Americanized route.

I'm nonplussed. It's too far off, and it doesn't mean much to my sense of fandom. It could be fine; it could be awful.