With the Harry Potter saga concluded, director David Yates is looking for his next project. After delivering the last four films and taking a well-deserved break, he was attached to direct an adaptation of Stephen King‘s The Stand. He recently turned it down due to desiring the mini-series approach instead, while Ben Affleck now circles. We now know what one of his future projects may be.
Yates is circling his own reboot of the BBC series Doctor Who, Variety reports The sci-fi series kicked off in 1963 and ran for over two decades before recently being rebooted by Russell T. Davies and The Adventures of Tintin writer Steven Moffat in 2005. Yates will work with BBC productions head Jane Tranter and they are currently on the search for writers, but don’t expect it anytime soon. He has stated, “we’re going to spend two to three years to get it right. It needs quite a radical transformation to take it into the bigger arena.”
With all the complex time-travel going on in the story, there is many directions he could go following the lead, a “super-intelligent alien in human form, who battles a variety of cosmic bad guys aided by plucky human companions.” For those expecting a continuation of what David Tennant and Matt Smith have done in the TV series, they will need to rethink the approach. Yated called the versions “fantastic,” but they plan to forget about them and “start from the scratch” with British sensibilities intact, but not exclusive to writers from that country.
Although I’m in the minority thinking Yates approach to the final Harry Potter films was dry and crumbled on top of itself, losing lots of charm and sense of discovery, I’m always down for smart sci-fi. Based on the heaps of praise this series gets, I’m quite interested to see what comes of a Hollywood adaptation, and if it can even be contained in a single film.
What do you think about a Doctor Who film from Yates? Are you a fan?