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

Randy Lofficier and Jean-Marc Lofficier's excellent book The Nth Doctor covers the numerous attempts to get a Doctor Who movie off the ground in the late '80s and early '90s, during the gap when the show was taken off the air.

The first script covered by the book was developed by the aforementioned Daltenreys, a company formed in 1986 by some former Doctor Who crew members. Daltenreys secured the film rights to Doctor Who and tasked Mark Ezra with penning a script, which he turned in in August 1987, with the uninspired title of Doctor Who: The Movie.

Although Daltenreys liked Ezra's script, they felt like the project needed someone more experienced and respected within the entertainment industry (to up its credibility), and so, they called in Johnny Byrne - the creator of ITV's Heartbeat and writer of several Doctor Who episodes - to do a rewrite, which was retitled Doctor Who: The Time Lord.

Now that the company had a script, they had to shop it around Hollywood to potential financial backers, which proved extremely difficult. The budget required for an effects-heavy sci-fi like Doctor Who was substantial, and there wasn't a studio that was willing to take the gamble, even though major stars like Alan Rickman and Donald Sutherland were floated around as possible leads.

After a few more rewrites - which introduced ideas like the Doctor suffering from amnesia, and Gallifrey being destroyed - the script had its title changed yet again, this time to Doctor Who: The Last of the Time Lords. However, this revision was never fully completed, with Byrne maxing out at 75 pages.

And things never improved from there. When Daltenreys kept hitting a brick wall in its search for a Hollywood partner, the company sold those precious film rights to French outfit Lumière Pictures, who soon began working on a movie of its own...