When you think about it, wouldn’t “Doctor Who” make a terrific movie?
All the elements for a summer hit are here: Time travel, evil robots, sexy “Companions.” You could cast some famed British actor as your Dr. Who - Ralph Fiennes would make an excellent choice unless you were too freaked out by “The Avengers,” or maybe Tim Roth in a rare sympathetic role - and cast some hot chickie as his #1 sidekick; maybe Kate Winslet would like another big box office role, and man, she’s sexy. Get the CGI folks to whomp up some cool Daleks screaming “EXTERMINATE!” in the voice of Harry Czerny, sign up Steven Soderbergh to direct, and you’ve got yourself a $250 million blockbuster. Hire Danny Elfman to rearrange a new “Doctor Who” theme using the old theme as the base, and all you’d have to do is count the money.
Hell, even the trailer would be great. You dress up Tim Roth in a beige coat and that funky multicoloured scarf. He’s walking along a London street. He steps into that phone booth, wink at the audience, and ZAP! the booth is gone! Cut to the “Doctor Who” logo and theme music, and “Coming July 4!” Holy crap, they’d be lining up overnight.
So why has it not been done? And don’t tell me it’s because he’s a British hero; American audiences LOVE British heroes.
I imagine a ‘proper’ movie won’t happen since Hollywood is worried about The Avengers effect. Cult TV, cult characters and British eccentricity don’t guarantee a hit at all.
Daleks are only scary if you’ve grown up with them. Doctor Who special effects worked best when CGI wasn’t around, and even then it was an odd combination of average effects, interesting plotlines and odd characters. Trying to replicate that is very difficult - as Ralph Fiennes and Uma Thurman could probably witness.
Cult fans would go see it. But the “cult” fans would also whine about every little detail that they left out or changed. The critics would claim that it lacked the low-budget schlocky charm of the original.
Plus, I don’t think anyone’s scared of garbage cans with lasers attached anymore - although a fun moment in the movie would happen when the Dr. says “don’t worry about the Daleks, we just need to find a flight of stairs” followed by the moment of shock when these new-fangled Daleks CAN climb stairs.
Plus a 1.5 hour film isn’t enough time to translate the mythology of the series to people who haven’t grown up with it. We’d be subjected to clumsy expository explanations of what a Time Lord is - the meaner critics would parody this with nasty “…and that’s how he became Lord of the Dance” comments.
The story would be PAINFUL. All of them were, when you think about it. Remember the planet where the giant vampires were sleeping underneath the main city? Or the futuristic Egyptian society with those faceless mummies who crush you between their chests?
I think Ralph Fiennes would make a terrible Doctor. Tim Roth could maybe pull it off. I’ve always thought Gene Wilder would be a good choice.
Ixnay on Danny Elfman. He’s a one-trick pony. But nor do I want U2 or Limp Bizkit doing their “unique take” on the theme.
Yeah, the Fox movie pretty much killed the chances for Doctor Who in the states, which is a shame. It was criminal how awful that movie was. I’ve often thought that the Sci-Fi channel should pick it up and roll with it - you can get a lot more done with less these days than in the original BBC days. Make each story an hour long (most of the four-parters were padded out anyway - episode three was always the ‘running in corridors’ episode) with the occasional two-parter and you’re golden. Give it the same budget as a Xena or Andromeda or whatever, you’ve got a built-in fanbase, an infinite amount of directions to take it. How can you go wrong, other than to have awful actors or writing (cf, the Fox Movie).
It especially gripes me because the BBC cancelled it because it wasn’t making money, yet they’ve been whoring it out to anyone who will pay for over ten years now. It’s like they killed a loved one and have been violating the corpse for decades. There are now more Doctor Who stories in print than there were stories on TV, and they still think it won’t make money?
Rumors of a new Dr. Who project continue to pop up all over the place, and usually come to nothing; however, it seems that the Beeb may be coming to its senses.
Recently, on the BBC website, there was an “internet radio” broadcast of an original six-part radio serial, DR. WHO: DEATH COMES TO TIME, starring Sylvester McCoy. It was a fabulous success, which surprised absolutely no one except, of course, the BBC. So now, word has it that the Beeb has asked the radio serial’s producer to submit a proposal for a new Who project, which may or may not be a tv series, a movie, a TV movie or another radio serial. No further details have been made available.
The problem with a Dr. Who movie is that it’s almost impossible to do a campy send-up of a cult hit (or comic book, or sci-fi story) while simultaneously creating a compelling story with interesting characters that we care about. Most of these films fail do do either, ending up with a mishmosh that pleases no one. The X-Men film chose the latter, creating a serious world that it believed in utterly without a lot of wink-wink/nudge-nudge catering to the long-time fans. How would you do that with something as low budget and campy as Dr. Who?
The local PBS station used this as a partial explanation for why Dr. Who was cancelled and why they would no longer air the old episodes. They said that no one person (or company) owns all the rights to Dr. Who. The author that came up with the Daleks gets paid every time a Dalek story is used or re-broadcast, the author that came up with the TARDIS… That could result in a large expense just in getting the right to make a new show before you add in wages, stages costs, and special effects, etc. It could be done but there are a lot of people that would be scared away by that.
(Has anyone else heard this or was the local TV station just trying to pass the blame elsewhere?)
I agree. The charm and fun of Dr. Who has always been the cheesy special effects, questionable acting and (at times) down right silly plot lines. Trying to reporduce that would be wrong and trying to make it polished and smooth just wouldn’t be Dr. Who.
(before you start screeming)yes, I agree some of the plots were good and some of the science-fiction concepts were brilliant.
I think a better time travel feature film would be Dr. Peabody, his pet boy Sherman and the wayback machine.
The WORST thing you could possibly do is try to make a movie out of the TV show. That’s what does in most movies that are derived from other visual media, and that’s why “X-Men” worked; they took the concept and the characters and made a MOVIE out of it. Even then I thought it was too cartoonish.
My X-Men movie, starring Tim Roth - sorry, but he’s a better actor than Alan Rickman, you’ll be amazed what he’d do with the role - would be a dead serious, big-budget, knock-your-socks off action spectacular. It wouldn’t be like the TV show, but it wouldn’t BE the TV show. It would be a different telling, a different story involving the same characters.
My one joke about the TV show would be to steal magdalene’s idea; the Doctor, Sarah-Jane (Ably played by Kate Winslet - Lucy Lawless, good Lord no!) K-9 and a cute moppet for added sympathetic effect would be fleeing from the first Daleks you see and come to a flight of stairs. The Doctor, with a wink, would say “Ha, those wheeled contraptions won’t catch us up here” and would climb the stairs. The Daleks would come roaring around the corner, screaming “EXTERMINATE!” (in the voice of Harry Czerny) and bump and mill around at the bottom of the stairs while Dr. Who peered around a corner at the top, laughing… and then suddenly the Daleks, like Transformers, would change form, unfolding into hideous, bipedal monsters with articulated arms that look as if they have nasty-ass weapons on them, and they’d come crashing up the stairs like linebackers, resulting in another terrific chase. Man, that would be great.
Another possible play on the show; have TWO female sidekicks, one played by Kate Winslet, the other by Julia Stiles. Their names: Sarah and Jane. Just once during the movie Dr. Who will say, “Sarah, Jane, come here.”
I’ve changed by mind about the composer of the original score, though; instead of Danny Elfman, I want Carter Burwell.
I din’t think the movie was too bad, but it could have been a lot better. in the original series the sets they used were soo bad, and the costuming cringeworthy. I don’t think they’d allow that now.
I also thought that that movie was going to be the first in a series of tele-movies. Ah well, I see I was wrong.
Also there have been various songs taking the Dr Who theme (who else remembers “Dr whooooo-oo, hey, the tardis”?). I quite like Orbital’s take from this year. It’s called funnily enough, “Doctor”.
NO WAY should Alan Rickman be the Doctor! The Master, maybe.
I wish I could find a copy of a cartoon I saw once. It was British, of course, and showed a big group of people with a speaker. The banner above him said something about a union rally. At the corner of a building close by there was a sign pointing to the “Executive Car Park”, and around the corner comes a Dalek shrieking “Exterminate!”
British Comic Relief did a parody of Dr Who, with Rowan Atkinson as the doc, Julia Sawalha as the companion, and Jonathon Pryce as the Master.
And from all accounts they got it EXACTLY RIGHT!!
It was a send-up, but they nailed the characters in precisely the way the fans wanted to see them!
If people can take that comprehension of the ideology of Dr Who, mix it with effects technology that isn’t there just to be flashy but actually supports a good rollicking Time Travel adventure, and then actually uses time travel as part of the plot - it doesn’t need Daleks or Cybermen really - then everyone would be happy!
Baker, did you get a chance to see Rickman in Dogma? That’s the personality that that the Doctor needs-grudgingly helpful, with a good dose of smartasss.
If the movie is going to be “camp” then don’t bother, IMO. The show was limited by its budget, but this doesn’t mean I want some silly, self-referential, smirking show trying to be campy and zany. There are good ideas there. There is a great idea for a franchise there. There are many, many good episodes that prove the show can be done more or less serious (which is not to say, without humor, but without self-depreciating, campy humor).
I would actually avoid using the Daleks in the movie, and save them for the sequel.
For those of you who didn’t see the FOX movie, here’s the travesty in a nutshell:
The Eye of Harmony (the source of all power on the planet Gallifrey) and the Staff and Sash of Rassilon were in the Doctor’s Tardis
Eric Roberts, with the proper beard, could have made a fantastic Master, but unfortunately, they decided to make him more of a Terminator, with the glasses and all.
The Doctor, it is revealed, is half-human, which factoid is put forth to explain why he can pass a retinal scan meant to detect one very particular human.