David Yates Is Developing DOCTOR WHO Film!

Director of the last four Harry Potter movies is developing a cinematic franchise around the iconic Timelord that will have no connections to the current BBC t.v. series.

By Matt Holmes /

After deciding an adaptation of Stephen King's The Stand wasn't really for him, Variety reports that the director of the last four Harry Potter movies David Yates is developing a Doctor Who movie with the BBC.
"We're going to spend two to three years to get it right," says Yates. "...We're looking at writers now."
This will be the Timelord's first big screen movie in decades and Yates says it will have no ties whatsoever to the current television incarnation starring Matt Smith, which is about to head into it's seventh season after next month's festive Christmas special. We can presume it will be a standalone story to setup a separate film universe and franchise...
"It needs quite a radical transformation to take it into the bigger arena...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." "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,"
Doctor Who celebrates his 50th anniversary in 2013 and is the longest running science fiction series of all time, running an incredible 26 seasons. After a lengthy hiatus the show was rebooted in 2005 for the small screen and has become a juggernaut of British television once again. Many fans would probably like to see a cinematic franchise born out of Russell T. Davies and Steven Moffat's ideas but Yates has made it clear this will be something completely new. Ironically, Yates is developing the film with Jane Tranter who oversaw the last revival of Doctor Who back in 2005.
"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
We have so many questions... Will it be an origin story? Will it essentially be Doctor Who Begins? Who will write it? Will Stephen Moffat, Russell T. Davies even be involved? Or will Yates once again work with his frequent Harry Potter writer Steve Kloves who he was planning on writing the two part epic The Stand with and who he has already name checked today. Would Yates even direct? Would they go after a movie star? Johnny Depp, Robert Downey Jr, could David Tennant return? Soooo many questions, but this story is just breaking....