In an article in Variety, published earlier today, director David Yates (Sex Traffic, The Girl in the Cafe) announced he was “teaming up with the BBC” to create a Doctor Who film.

It seems the man who helmed Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, Half-Blood Prince and Deathly Hallows hasn’t had enough of fantasy film franchises, and is working with Jane Tranter of BBC Worldwide’s LA-based arm to develop a potential follow-up… with Doctor Who as its subject.

It is important to note that at this stage, the project has yet to find a writer, and is a long way from commencing production.

“We’re going to spend two to three years to get it right,” said Yates. “It needs quite a radical transformation to take it into the bigger arena. We want a British sensibility, but having said that, Steve Kloves wrote the Potter films and captured that British sensibility perfectly, so we are looking at American writers too.”

The plan, it seems, is not to create something that ties-in with the current version of the television series, but instead to produce an ‘alternative’ take on Doctor Who, presumably with an entirely new lead actor, and possibly also with a Page One reboot. 

Many Doctor Who fans will be outraged at this approach, but in the hands of the director who was not only behind the television version of State of Play, but also the last four Harry Potter films, and working with the woman who greenlit Doctor Who’s return to television in 2005, the film version is surely in the safest possible hands. 

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