NO.

I guess I’ll elaborate: The recent news of the (now confirmed as bogus) preliminary production on a big theatrical Doctor Who film had me both excited and worried. I’ve seen what happens when a “movie” version of the franchise gets made, and although Peter Cushing Tried his best, those were some “craptacular” films to be honest. The budget was bloated to the point where some guy obviously said “the TV show doesn’t have color, so let’s jack this thing to the brim with so much color that even Liberace will find it garish and unappealing…”

This combined with a need to “change the story to fit the medium” and other movie-maker B.S. led to a product that didn’t feel like the show it was based on, and somehow seemed “cheaper” than a show that was filmed in a flea infested backlot for the first few years. I know that if I had even seen the movies at the height of “Dalekmania” back in the 60’s I might have loved it, but I’m a jaded Gen X /Gen Y guy and both movies bore the pants off of me. It really doesn’t help that my favorite episode of classic Doctor Who is The Dalek Invasion of Earth, the basis for the second film.

So anyway, there have been rumblings for a few years now that there would be a big budget Doctor Who film at some point. The sheer shock of this sentiment was only made worse when big nerdy websites started suggesting “dream casting” with actors such as Johnny Depp that were somehow in the running to play the Doctor. It seemed that someone had missed the point and we were in line for Depp’s bizarre take on a classic fictional character. “Sweet!” I thought to myself “we’ll get a Tim Burton directed Doctor with a loud cross between a camp homosexual accent and British accent, and insane clothes just to make sure people know he’s eccentric! And maybe Danny Elfman can do the soundtrack!!” This was of course sarcasm as that would be nearly unwatchable.

It’s not that I don’t want something like this to ever happen, it’s just that Hollywood has a habit of jumping onto something popular, raping it for all it’s worth, then dropping it in the gutter if it fails to be the next Avatar. I could come up with one-hundred examples where this has happened, but I’ll run with another UK-based TV show to film conversion: the mid-90’s Bean Movie. I always liked the Mr. Bean episodes that ran on PBS around that time, I guess it had something of a U.S. resurgence then due to HBO frequently running the episodes, and plans were made to create a movie for American Audiences. Suddenly the title character, as played by Rowan Atkinson, was sidelined as the main character and everything was Americanized. There was nothing particularly wrong about the new characters added in, but let’s be honest here, nobody cared about an uptight American family; all they wanted to see was Mr. Bean. It was like watching a high school theater version of a Shakespeare play; the spirit was there, but everything seemed off. The movie did poorly as a result, and thank the lord that a real Mr. Bean movie came out later, one that felt like a continuation of the show.

This is what would happen with Doctor Who. The Hollywood producers would cast aside everything that makes it what it is in favor of trying to make a new audience. Last time I checked this cross-global whitewashing and repackaging has NEVER worked aside from a few Japanese horror films!

Luckily these tweets make me feel better:

(Twitter Images floating around on the net, not sure original source)

“If, and when, the movie happens it will need to star television’s Doctor Who — and there’s only ever one of those at a time. And it would need to come out of the same production operation that makes the series … Doctor Who is a vitally important BBC brand with a huge international audience and not even Hollywood can start this one from scratch. So sorry if there’s been any confusion, but on the plus side it has reminded us all what an exciting prospect this could be.”