- The BBC has confirmed that gross fan fiction will be made real when David Tennant and Billie Piper join newer Doctor and companion Matt Smith and Jenna-Louise Coleman in this November's Doctor Who 50th anniversary special. John Hurt will also appear to be like, "Wouldn't I have been a pretty good Doctor?" We will agree.
- While Stephen Soderbergh has retired from feature films, he's not quite ready to finally bite into that new Bioshock quite yet. In addition to stage versions of Magic Mike and Cleopatra, he tells EW he's also working to adapt John Barth's 1960 novel The Sot-Weed Factor into a 12-hour miniseries. The one-hour episodes will look at the colonization of Maryland in the 1600s from a satirical angle. Truly nothing is sacred.
- Billy Crudup, Anton Yelchin, Selena Gomez, and Laurence Fishburnehave signed on to star alongside Felicity Huffman and William H. Macy in Macy's directorial debut, Rudderless. The film focuses on a father who, after the loss of his son, discovers the deceased kid's written music and forms a band in the hopes of finding himself closure. Instead, he finds himself in the behind-the-warnings stock footage of an erectile dysfunction drug commercial.
Saturday the 30th kicks off the new series of Doctor Who with the Stephen Moffat-scripted "The Bells Of Saint John," and BBC America has released a new promo teasing what's to come. Will this be the year the Doctor finally gives up all this time/space travel stuff and goes back home to his family and small-town medical practice? It doesn't look like it. Sorry, Mrs. Who.
While the first Doctor Who seventh series trailer played it close to their cowboy robot's rawhide vest, teasing mostly a Wild West plot involving a Westworld-like android gunslinger, this newest preview goes for more of a kitchen sink approach. Beyond more looks at the Maverick-themed Borg, we see here that Rory, Amy, and the increasingly-drunk-sounding Doctor also encounter triceratops on a spaceship, Tyson tattoos on an old fashioney guy, a dinosaur hunter with an ancient Egyptian, and some other outlandish combinations that Hollywood now wishes they were developing movies about. It also seems there will be some kind of Dalek tribunal, though that's really a pretty minor Dalek point when you consider that the trailer closes on the reveal that there will be a Dalek genocide that wipes out all those a-holes. So, spoiler alert, I guess?
Those videos of Breaking Bad and Mad Men as old school role-playing games were fun and all, but if you're going to do something as nerdy as adapting a TV show into a fake Super Nintendo RPG, shouldn't the show itself be just as nerdy? Probably not, actually. The juxtaposition between serious melodrama and nostalgic gaming is largely what made those so entertaining. Still, it works with nerdier shows, too, and as evidence, here's a video depicting the most recent incarnation of Doctor Who by way of Chrono Trigger and Pokémon. If most of those words made sense to you, you will probably like it. (16-bit spoilers!)
Last we heard about the upcoming season of Doctor Who, executive producer Steven Moffat made some big promises about a new companion, a "heartbreaking departure," and "one of the biggest mysteries the Time Lord ever encounters." You don't really get a sense of much heartbreak or THE BIGGEST MYSTERY EVER in this trailer for the Doctor's latest adventures, but you do get some reference to Daleks and some kind of RoboCowboy, which should probably be plenty to get the average Doctor Who fan pretty excited. (The average Doctor Who fan really likes Daleks and villains that look like something between Star Trek: The Next Generation fan art and the DVD cover for Westworld.)
As Doctor Who fans know well enough to make a touching tribute on the subject, when the Doctor rolls, he typically likes to roll with a nice-looking lady at his side, so that no one gets the wrong idea about all his colorful eccentricities. He also likes to roll in a police box that is actually a time machine/spaceship that is very spacious inside, but that's an issue for another nerdy day. We can discuss that at our weekly Doctor Who viewing party. What we're talking about now is how the Doctor's current companion, Amy Pond, is leaving with husband Rory in what's described as a "heartbreaking departure" later this season. The Doctor is going to need a new ladyfriend to become object of fan lust/fiction, and it looks like it's going to be Jenna-Louise Coleman.
Moments from every episode of Doctor Who, from 1963 to the present, collected in a single video. Nearly half a century of science fiction distilled and bottled into ten minutes and eleven Time Lords. After viewing, please seal this away in a time capsule, so that future generations may know what fucking losers we were.
The wizarding world of Glasses Wizard behind him, four-time Harry Potter director David Yates has decided he might as well move right long to the next fantastical, baton-wielding British icon. Variety reports Yates is about to start work on what the director predicts will be two to three years of development on transforming the BBC's Doctor Who into a major film franchise.
Rather than ask a largely Who-clueless America to borrow his DVDs and catch up--starting with the series' Tom Baker years, then maybe watching a few First Doctor episodes just to get a sense of history before checking out the modern era of David Tennant and current Doctor Matt Smith--Yates's plan is to "put that aside and start from scratch." Probably a smart idea, because despite what head writers Russell T. Davies and Steven Moffat may have done to reinvigorate the show in recent years, Doctor Who's story of a Time Lord maneuvering through time and space in a police box is still a pretty tough sell without some backstory. It's not entirely your friends' fault they can't get into it, OK?
Yates and the BBC's Jane Tranter are currently on the search for a writer to capture the character's inherent "British sensibility."
"But having said that," Yates added, "Steve Kloves wrote the Potter films and captured that British sensibility perfectly, so we are looking at American writers too." So, really, it's too early to predict who at all could be hired on to write, just as it's too early to start guessing at casting. Being seeing as how we let Robert Downey Jr. portray Sherlock Holmes, it seems only fair we at least give Jeff Goldblum an in-scarf audition. Am I alone on this?
New Doctor Who logo! "DW" as a tardis! Lens flares! And no one is more excited about it than leader writer/executive producer Steven Moffat, who said:
Look at that, something really new - an insignia! DW in TARDIS form! Simple and beautiful, and most important of all, a completely irresistible doodle. I apologise to school notebooks everywhere, because in 2010 that's what they're going to be wearing.
Sorry, notebooks, children will totally be doodling this logo on you! And then--more bad news--you'll be knocked out of their frail, nerdy arms by bullies, then get picked up and drenched in their salty tears! This is the worst threat to notebooks since that music video where a kid draws Billy Idol in their notebook.
I'm not the biggest Doctor Who fan, but I do respect his insistence on demanding to always knows why everyone is everywhere. I also respect his scarf and sonic screwdriver.
As promised a couple weeks ago, here's the first part of the fan-made Doctor Who Christmas Special that seamlessly fuses the modern Doctor with '60s Star Trek. Like when a girl puts on a Leia suit at a comic convention, the actualization of such a nerd fantasy is at once beautiful and dangerously close to a lawsuit:
