Dr. Who Movie in the Pipeline

It’s been 45 years since the last Dr. Who feature film, but the world-famous British TV series will finally be hitting the big screen again.

The BBC has confirmed to Variety that director David Yates (most famous for his work on Harry Potter) will helm the film, which will reportedly take the series in “an entirely new direction” from the ongoing TV series. Says Yates:

“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.”

I would have thought floppy-limbed fop Matt Smith from the TV series would also play the movie’s Doctor as well – he fits the part very well, I think – but the Huff Post thinks not:

“[…] it sounds unlikely that Smith will take the role of the alien space-traveling genius into the film. Yates worked with the most recent previous Doctor, David Tennant, in the Harry Potter series, but it also stands to reason that they won’t be bringing back an old Doctor. Presumably, then, the alien Doctor will take another form for the film.”

Dr. Who and the Daleks (1965) and Daleks’ Invasion Earth: 2150 A.D. (1966) remain the only two full-length movies from the Dr. Who franchise – staggering for a series with a merchandise empire that would put many Disney productions to shame. Both sound rather different to the new movie, however, in that they are retellings of existing television stories, but with a larger budget and tweaks to the series concept.

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