The True Story Behind Doctor Who's Abandoned Anniversary Movie

4. Budget Miscalculations Lead The Project To Be Abandoned

Classic Doctor Who
BBC Studios

Fan excitement over The Dark Dimension was short-lived. A BBC board meeting on 10 July had decided that the anniversary multi-Doctor story was a hastily cobbled together cash-grab. Citing the upset the project had caused past Doctors and the unrealistic production schedule, the board decided to send BBC Enterprises a memo that cancelled The Dark Dimension for "financial and logistical reasons". Rumours suggest that "the financial reasons" related to the cost of broadcasting the special not being factored into BBC Enterprise's budget.

This wasn't quite the end of the project however, and Rigelsford set about rewriting his script for a potential Christmas 1993 release. Meanwhile, in America, Philip Segal, working at Steven Spielberg's Amblin Entertainment had heard about the project and was concerned. In a DVD interview for 1996's Doctor Who TV Movie, Segal said:

"I read the script and it was awful. It was really embarrassing, and it was silly, and we were going to march out all of the old Doctors, and it just felt wrong. It was going to muddy the waters and confuse people, especially as we were so close to delivering our bible and our script."

Segal requested that BBC Enterprise's senior manager Tony Greenwood put a stop to the project, thus putting the final nail in The Dark Dimension's coffin.

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Citizen of the Universe, Film Programmer, Writer, Podcaster, Doctor Who fan and a gentleman to boot. As passionate about Chinese social-realist epics as I am about dumb popcorn movies.