David Yates has been spending the better part of the last seven years directing the final half of one of the most lucrative franchises in the history of cinema. Now that the plucky “boy who lived” is all done with his misadventures at Hogwarts, Yates is looking to bring his new found clout to another of Britian’s fictional Goliaths, Dr. Who.
Variety is reporting that Yates has teamed up with BBC Worldwide Productions to bring the Doctor to the movies.
“We’re looking at writers now. We’re going to spend two to three years to get it right,” [Yates] said. “It needs quite a radical transformation to take it into the bigger arena.”
Dr. Who is the longest running sci-fi television show of all time. Spanning nearly fifty years, this classic show has gone under several major overhauls and is know for it’s ability to re-shuffle itself on the fly. The most incredible thing about the Dr. Who franchise is that flexibility has been worked into the cannon of the show. The Doctor is always the same guy, he just “regenerates” into a new body, personality and all. Neat huh?
While it is extremely exciting to have BBC working on a big screen adventure of the Doctor, there was one small detail that could be troublesome.
“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.
I am willing to give the benefit of the doubt to a filmmaker who has delivered the high profile goods before, but this is a puzzling creative decision. Dr. Who is almost as popular now as it has ever been, and it is just around the corner from a 50th anniversary in 2013. It will be very hard to juggle an incredibly popular TV series so near a marquee year with a feature sporting an entirely different continuity fighting for attention.
That said, this is just an announcement and the two to three year window is just a little bit coincidental with the up coming 50th anniversary and potential 12th Doctor. So it is possible Yates and BBC are holding out for a bigger reveal.
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