Good news, nerds. (I think?) Your beloved Doctor Who television show is set to become a movie from Harry Potter director David Yates. Though according to Yates, it won’t follow the storyline from the TV series. Hopefully that means no British people. EEK, ACCENTS ARE SCARY!
Yates, who directed the last four Potter films, told Daily Variety that he is about to start work on developing a “Doctor Who” movie with Jane Tranter, BBC Worldwide’s L.A.-based exec VP of programming and production.
“We’re looking at writers now. We’re going to spend two to three years to get it right,” he said. “It needs quite a radical transformation to take it into the bigger arena.”
“Doctor Who” follows 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.
“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,” Yates said.
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”). Tranter oversaw the revival when she was the BBC’s drama topper in London.
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.
“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,” he said.
Yates and Tranter are looking for writers on both sides of the Atlantic.
“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,” he explained. [Variety]
I’ll probably end up in a Warcraft dungeon with a Bat’leth up my ass for saying this, but I tried to watch Dr. Who once on a plane and I was just confused (also, British TV has a way of looking like it was filmed on a cell phone in a dingy office building). But seeing as how it involves time travel, I’m holding out hope that there will be velociraptors.
“Oh, ‘ello, guv. Top a da mornin’ to ya. Say ol’ chap, did you ‘appen ta catch oo won lahst noight’s cricket match onda footy pitch– OH GOD NO!”
(*elevator arrives at your floor, filled with dead Englishmen and velociraptors*)