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

8. Doctor Who Meets Scratchman

Doctor Who Tom Baker
BBC

While the other movies on this list would've featured brand-new actors cast in the title role, Doctor Who Meets Scratchman is an outlier for the fact that it would've actually starred the current (at the time) TV Doctor, Tom Baker.

The movie - alternatively titled Doctor Who and the Big Game - was written by Baker and Ian Marter (who played companion Harry Sullivan) and their ideas for the story and characters sounded pretty bonkers, even by Doctor Who standards.

In the film, the Doctor and his companions would've faced off against the villainous Scratchman, who was actually the Devil. The Daleks and the Cybermen were also involved, as was a group of scarecrows that could come to life. Oh, and the climax would've taken place on a huge pinball table. Because... reasons.

However, the project was never greenlit by the BBC, and it only got as far as the scripting stage. While it didn't make it to the big screen, Doctor Who Meets Scratchman was eventually turned into a novel and audiobook, the latter of which was narrated by Baker himself.

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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!