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Wikileaks 'reveals Doctor Who film plans'
CD93
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Danny Cohen, the Director of BBC Television, claimed that the popular TV series will become a film under an eight-year plan to keep the franchise alive.
But the show’s team are "very hot under the collar" because they feel "their position on it is not being listened to or accepted."
They want to wait until the time is right and have made their feelings "very clear" on the matter, one Sony email reveals.
Mr Cohen claims there is "tremendous interest" in a Dr Who film and says there has been "pressure" to make it from BBC Worldwide, the corporation’s money-making arm.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/bbc/11544035/BBC-bosses-at-odds-with-Doctor-Who-writers-over-plans-for-Hollywood-film.html
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or as this is time travel
Great Scott!!!!!
*taxi for one please
Of course these e mails were before the big success of Day of the Doctor in cinemas....
Also Peter Capaldi on the consideration list for Pixels (which went to Peter Dinklage).
"an eight-year plan to keep the franchise alive" - Well it's eight years until the 60th anniversary, so could the plan be to make a movie special rather than a TV special?
And with a movie budget, they may even get a CGI Hartnell, Pertwee or Baker as good as the young Arnold Schwarzenegger in the new Terminator film.
Cohen has to make up for BBC Worldwide's loss of Top Gear!
Don't reboot it. Don't prequel it up. But make it accessible, a bold new jumping on point with no commitment to play to it's past.
"We are not of this race. We are not of this earth. Susan and I are wanderers in the fourth dimension of time and space. We need your clothes, your boots and your motorcycle."
"Oh my giddy aunt! Oh my word! Come with me if you want to live!"
"I'm going to reverse the polarity of the neutron flow. Hasta la vista, baby."
The email says: "He (Cohen) said that while there has been tremendous interest (and pressure from BBCWW) (BBC Worldwide) to do a Dr Who film, the show runners feel very clear that they don’t want to do one at this moment."
The problem for the film is that the current Doctor Who team isn't able to keep up with the production of the TV show - never mind adding a film into the mix.
There are no spin-off shows anymore, and we've had five years of stop-start production with ever increasing gaps between seasons - which included a 50th anniversary year that saw the production of just TWO episodes.
I can't help but think that the original team of Russell T Davies/Julie Gardner/Mal Young/Phil Collinson would have jumped at the chance to make a Hollywood film version.
I'm also not sure Peter Capaldi's older, grumpy Doctor would be successful for a bigger cinema audience. And for a movie to work I think it would need its own companion - it would need to be something like Rose with the Doctor's weird world being introduced to someone new, rather than an assumption that the audience knows it all.
Will strongly disagree until the end of time
As for age - well I don't see how that's a factor in cinema at all, when we have actors in their 60s and 70s leading blockbusters. I'm sure cinema go'ers can accept a 2000 year old man looking older than 30.
But Peter probably won't be The Doctor then anyway, so they'll have to settle for the attractive female lead they cast instead.
Not everyone is old enough to have seen classic who, but most who would go to a film in a few years would have had who on there screens for probably about 15 years constantly by the time it would be made, so if they had chosen to ignore it for that long then I seriously doubt those people would choose to go to see a doctor who film anyway, so why cater to those who would likely never see it anyway?
Amber Heard, with Justin Bieber as her companion...
Dear God , what am I saying??!!!
Actually I can't imagine anything worse than a Hollywoodised film version of Doctor Who.
There's a very good reason why it's been a damn good TV show for 50+ years.
It's a TV show.
That's why.
And the whole format works incredibly well, on TV.
The whole idea of a Major Motion Picture fills me with horror. A while back someone very talented mocked up a poster for a Disneyfied film of Doctor Who. It was a wonderfully clever poster, but scarily, horribly plausible. http://danowen.blogspot.co.uk/2010/07/disneys-doctor-who.html
It also affects the "shelf-life" of the movie if it features the then-current TV cast. Mulder and Scully are The X-Files in public consciousness. (Even though other characters were brought in for the later series.) The 12th Doctor and Clara, for example, represent the 2014-2015 version of Doctor Who. A film with that cast will be dated by the arrival of Danny Dyer and Rolf Harris as the 13th Doctor and Peregrine.
I'm not sure that's the case. I seem to remember an awful lot of scene-setting/character establishment in both X-Files movies so non-fans could enjoy them - and that was certainly the case in Serenity because I'd never watched Firefly but was able to enjoy the move and completely understand it. Even the Inbetweeners movie begins with a long voice over that explains who everyone is. And as I recall, the League of Gentlemen movie was a bit of a mess.
I think 'assumed knowledge' is a dangerous route to go down for any film because it would deter non-fans - its certainly the reason a lot of people feel the 1996 TV movie didn't work. There was an assumption that everyone watching knew the Police Box that was flying through the time vortex in the opening sequence was the outside of the enormous control room Sylvester McCoy was sitting in moments later. And then that whole regeneration bit . .. dear lord!
Assumed Knowledge
Some TV-show-to-movie projects work on the basis that the viewing audience is largely aware of the characters being portrayed in the film - that most people who pay to go and see the film are fans already. This can work...sometimes. There are other things to consider though - a large audience for a late-night Friday comedy series is differently defined to a large audience for a Saturday primetime sci-fi show. A large and devoted TV viewership needs to be able to convert into a reasonably large potential movie-going audience as well. In the case of Doctor Who, you need to be able to secure yourself a box office win that will earn back the costs of production - which are likely to be considerably higher than that of, say, The Inbetweener's.
A Show About Change
As others have mentioned, you have the issue of who to cast in your lead role. Doctor Who is such a timeless show - since its return in 2005 we haven't had a single series that hasn't made additions or changes to the title cast. In fact 2011's Series 6 (and soon Series 9 as well) is the only series that didn't lose anyone from the main cast. Who do you cast as a Doctor and companion so definitive that they get a role in the film? Do you stick with the ones that currently appear in the TV show? Do you cast wholly original actors, and if so how will they be canonised and remembered by the TV show? Paul McGann is undoubtedly popular as The Doctor, but his greatest success has been with Big Finish and The Night of the Doctor. Few would call his debut adventure a definitive movie experience. A show so rooted in the concept of change and timelessness would have to defy its own nature in order to make a movie work.
Premise
Another major question is what kind of event do you go for that could warrant a Doctor Who movie? The TV series already has rare levels of ambition - past, present, future, parallels, alternates and everything in between. We've seen warzones brought to the screen with what is comparatively stunning CGI, and though some ambitious ideas aren't quite done adequate justice (Journey to the Centre of the Tardis) you then have to wonder whether some things are best left to the imagination. What event could be so big that it warrants a film to tell it? Presumably it would be spectacular, and for lack of a better term 'game-changing'. The X-FIles: Fight the Future took this on board - dealing with a major storyline between Seasons 5 and 6 of the TV series, upping the budget a little and having a healthy dose of exposition on either end. But in that instance it worked because Tbe X-Files doesn't have the issues Doctor Who has - it's not as timeless, it's characters are iconic and played by actors who own their roles exclusively. Doctor Who is far more tangible in principle, and you can up the budget all you want for a feature film, but can a feature film depict something unique that the TV series already can't?
Format Alienation
Sometimes you also get the issue of a TV series losing its way once it takes to another platform or format. Buffy the Vampire Slayer is the best example I can think of - running for seven successful TV seasons, and then continued in a supposedly canonical comic series. Comics are apparently wonderful things, able to do what the TV series can't - it can bring back long-gone characters who were unavailable for return to TV because of actor commitments, and it can depict concepts on a grand scale that the TV series couldn't possibly afford to do. It sounds wonderful in principle, but there seems to be no restraint where this sort of thing is concerned. You can suddently depict giant battles, and turn your supporting characters into a centaur (no joke, they did that to a character in Buffy's comics) and bring back that character played by a high-profile actor you could never have gotten a second time on TV... but by doing so the concept loses the heart of what its depicting.
If you take Doctor Who and leave nothing to the imagination, take it to the big screen and depict the Time War in full epic 4K it might look great, but the charm is gone. The power to imagine is gone. Doctor Who can pride itself as a TV series that feels massive - it has a fully believable universe filled with all matter of life and bold characters. It hasn't ever needed flashy, movie-scale budgets to impress. There's a certain prestige and excitement at the show being so successful that such a concept is considered, but it would be very easy for a movie to alienate itself from its original product - for a Doctor Who Movie to not feel like Doctor Who.
BBC Politics
This one is more technicality than anything, but there are various hurdles in the way. The BBC can't be seen to be making a profit from the show it produces from the TV License. It could produce the film, and BBC Worldwide could foot the bill, but TV show viewers couldn't be required to watch the film to gain understanding of the TV show (despite the fact every fan would watch both). As such, the film under current conditions would likely have to standalone. Could it be canonical? Would they need to rest the TV show in order to fit in a movie? There are many things to consider even before you reach the point of drafting a premise.
Me, personally, am indifferent. A movie would be awesome, and unless they put David Tennant in the lead role (thankfully an implausiblility) I'd be seeing it the week it was released. But I'm also sceptical about it... I don't know if a film would work, I have doubts I'd enjoy a film as I do the TV series, and I hold the opinion that I'd rather see the TV series run undisrupted than having to cater to a film.
If it's a turkey, perhaps that will shake the BBC's confidence in making a film of their own.
15 months ago:
Hasn't Moffat just talked to BBC Worldwide about their plans for the next five years? Who knows what was said... but these emails imply the movie will have been discussed again. With or without Moff.
i hope to god we havent got another 5 years of Moffat
Though, as Moffat said, the movie would have to be in a different universe to the show, much like the Peter Cushing Dalek films in the '60s.
I think he's on record saying the opposite to that - that any movie would have to be a part of the TV show, using the current TV Doctor. That's what I thought anyway.