Despite promises to make a few small movies now that he's done with the Harry Potter franchise, Deathly Hallows director David Yates is going to hand another iconic British character his own movie franchise. According to Variety Yates is teaming up with the BBC to develop a Doctor Who movie, based on the long-running sci-fi TV series that currently stars Matt Smith as the space and time-traveling doctor.
But don't count on seeing Smith, or the recently popular Doctor David Tennant, on the big screen. Yates told Variety that the show "Needs quite a radical transformation to take it into the bigger arena," and that they won't be adapting the current series but starting "from scratch." Yates told them that he and the BBC are currently in the process of looking for writers, and "we're going to spend two to three years to get it right"-- meaning that Yates might have plenty of time to direct those smaller films after all before a Doctor Who movie takes shape.
As one of the longest running TV shows in history-- Doctor Who first went on the air in 1963, and Smith is the 11th actor to play the Time Lord-- the series is obviously a good fit for a movie, with tons of back story and situations already explored that could be adapted for the big screen. As Yates himself said it, "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." Or if you want to hear from the bona fide Doctor Who fan we have here on staff, here's what our own Josh Tyler had to say about the news over at our Sci-Fi site GFR:
A lot of the best Doctor Who episodes are basically 2 hours long and self-contained science fiction stories.The Doctor is a character you can sort of inject into any situation... and then just see what happens. As long as you have the right kind of person playing The Doctor.
So I guess that's the big question-- who will be playing the Doctor? Will he be able to pull it off? And is David Yates-- who directed the last four Harry Potter movies-- the right guy to tackle another iconic character? Sound off in the comments, Doctor Who fanatics-- the project is still in early stages, so now is the time to have your voice heard.
