By Harry Potter director David Yates, not content with helming the second most well-known British series of the past fifty years, is currently developing a big screen adaptation of the seminal BBC series Doctor Who. Don’t expect to see the current Doctor, Matt Smith (in the image above, to the left), on cinema screens anytime soon, or at all, however. Yates said, on the project’s early stages of development, “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.” He goes on to say that the film will not follow the continuity of the current series at all: “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.” This is not specifically saying the film won’t follow any of Doctor Who’s near-fifty years of television continuity, though the current series won’t be a jumping-off point.
I’m a big Who fan, so I don’t know what to think of this. The past two seasons of Doctor Who, under the guidance of Steven Moffat, has been the best the series has seen in years, and Matt Smith has proven to be an astounding Doctor. On top of that, the decades of continuity the series has built up shouldn’t be ignored, I think, just so Yates can take it in whatever direction he wants. Obviously, he should tell whatever story he wants to, but there’s room to do that without tossing out all of Who‘s history in the name of putting a personal stamp on it.
[Variety, via IGN]