Who knows if Matt Smith will make it into the “Doctor Who” movie?
There are people I know who I like, admire, and respect, and who, frankly, I would like to be rather than myself, who are experts on “Doctor Who.” And not just British people who might have grown up around the venerable scifi series, but Americans who found it and latched onto it with the same passion as the folks across the pond. Yet they’ve never been able to persuade me to join their ranks. It’s not that I have contempt for the show, or sneer at sci-fi. Quite the opposite, in fact. I would love to love it. But I’ll be honest–it just looks like too much work to try to jump into it now. I just don’t have time to catch up on all the doctors (what number are they up to now? Eleven? 465? Something like that, right?) and their complex histories. Sadly, I remain a complete barbarian in this area.
Could I be persuaded by a movie version, though? Just one evening out of my life, one story, one doctor? Well, we may find out–Variety reports that David Yates, best known for directing the last few “Harry Potter” movies, is in the process of developing a big screen “Doctor Who.”
The series 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.” It originally ran from 1963 to 1989, and then was revived in 2005 by writer Russell T. Davies, followed by Steven Moffat. Jane Tranter, who oversaw the new version of the series, will produce with Yates.
Yates said, “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.”
The movie will not be connected to the current TV series. Mr. Yates? Your thoughts? “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.”
Matt Smith plays the current incarnation of the doctor on TV. No word if he’ll be involved. I mean, they don’t even have a script yet. Casting is a ways off, people.
Yates said this is two or three years away from happening, to monitor your excitement. I might have to put those two or three years to use to try to figure the whole phenomenon out.
“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.
Yates explains:
