Why the Doctor Who Movie is an Awful Idea

Steven Moffat and the BBC have definitely been guilty of a few missteps with the past season of Doctor Who; but that all pales into insignificance compared to the latest rumors of infamy emerging from Shepherd's Bush.

Matt Smith has every right to look nervous.

L.A.-based BBC Worldwide Productions is apparently planning a big-screen outing for Britain's favorite time traveler - but here's the kicker: It won't have anything to do with the current Doctor Who at all.

"What Russell T. Davies and then Steven Moffat have done was fantastic," explained Harry Potter director David Yates, tipped to head the project. "But we have to put that aside and start from scratch."

"The notion of the time-travelling Time Lord is such a strong one, because you can express story and drama in any dimension or time."

"We're looking at writers now. We're going to spend two to three years to get it right," said Yates. "It needs quite a radical transformation to take it into the bigger arena. We want a British sensibility, but having said that, Steve Kloves wrote the Potter films and captured that British sensibility perfectly, so we are looking at American writers too."

With a release date of late 2012 or 2013, all I can say is this:

DISASTER!

Doctor Who fans finally had the Doctor they deserved, and plot and pacing that the original series (and the more tedious episodes from Russell T. Davies' tenure) lacked Yet this idiot Yates want to throw it all away?

Fifty years of television heritage? Five decades of (essentially) unbroken continuity? A modern vision of something that's been a childhood memory for three generations of kids in Britain and beyond? And he wants to start from scratch?

I'm immediately fearing the worst - the trampling of something precious. It seems inevitable it'll go the same way as it did when Phillip Noyce murdered The Saint, and Frank Miller slaughtered The Spirit.

The first rule of tackling something so beloved by fans is to stay true to the source material (and you'd think Yates would have known that, since he was tediously loyal to J. K. Rowling's books when he directed the last four, lackluster chapters of the Harry Potter saga.)

Doctor Who the movie is going to be a disaster. You have been warned.