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

4. Leonard Nimoy And Pierce Brosnan's The Jewels Of Time

Goldeneye Pierce Brosnan
MGM

One of the first things Lumière did once they took control was to chuck Byrne's work out the window and seek out a writer of their own.

The company believed that Doctor Who had the potential to be a big movie franchise like Star Trek, and so, pulling on that thread, they sought out Denny Martin Flinn - co-writer of Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country - to develop a script, which came to be known as The Jewels of Time.

Around the same time, the company also approached Spock himself, Leonard Nimoy, and asked him to helm the project. Nimoy liked Flinn's script and agreed to direct and produce, which gave Lumière the confidence (since they now had a respected name like Nimoy in their corner) to push ahead. And from here, things got even more juicy.

In the Nth Doctor, it's mentioned that the idea was for Pierce Brosnan - yes, the future Bond - to play the Doctor. While the film was planned to feature a handful of Doctors (each of a variety of ages), Brosnan would have been the lead, portraying another iconic British character a few years before he became James Bond.

Sadly, Lumière failed to get things moving, and in April 1994, the film rights automatically reverted to the BBC, and Nimoy became disassociated with the project.

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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!