10 Failed Doctor Who Movies (And Why They Didn't Happen)

9. Peter Cushing's Doomed Threequel

Doctor Who Peter Cushing
BBC

Unbeknownst to a lot of people, Paul McGann's '90s TV reboot isn't the only time Doctor Who has been given the movie treatment.

In the mid-1960s, Peter Cushing - who would go on to play Grand Moff Tarkin in a little movie called Star Wars - starred in two Doctor Who films, both of which were based on popular stories from the show (although they weren't a part of its ongoing continuity).

The first film was called Dr. Who and the Daleks - based on the William Hartnell serial The Daleks - and was successful enough to inspire a sequel, Daleks Invasion Earth: 2150 AD, which was based on Hartnell's second Dalek serial, The Dalek Invasion of Earth.

Unfortunately, the sequel didn't perform too well commercially, and as a result, the proposed third film - which would have been based on The Chase, another Hartnell/Dalek serial - was canned.

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Danny has been with WhatCulture for over ten years, and is currently Doctor Who Editor and WhoCulture Channel Manager, overseeing all of WhatCulture's Whoniverse coverage. In 2022, he took charge of WhoCulture and has grown it into the biggest Doctor Who channel on YouTube, and one of the biggest Doctor Who communities on the web full-stop. He has been writing and video editing since his early teens, and first got a taste for content creation after making his own Doctor Who trailers, off the back of a burning obsession with the Matt Smith era of the show. Like many his age, he first got into Doctor Who with the 2005 revival, but has since gone back and fallen in love with the classic years too. If you need someone to recite every Doctor Who episode in order, or to give you a random factoid about the making of Gridlock, Danny is the person to ask!