DOCTOR WHO: THE MOTION PICTURE At Last?

Is a Doctor Who movie finally going to happen?

According to Variety, Harry Potter director David Yates and the BBC are working on turning Doctor Who into a feature film franchise.  Now that the Harry Potter films have ended, Yates is reportedly about to begin starting work on the project with Jane Tranter, head of L.A.-based BBC Worldwide Productions.

"We're looking at writers now," said Yates.  "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."

Apparently, the film will not be a continuation of the 48-year-old television series and will feature a completely new take on the material.  "Russell T. Davies and then Steven Moffat have done their own transformations," said Yates, "which were fantastic, but we have to put that aside and start from scratch."

The article claims that writers are being looked at on both side of the Atlantic.  "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."

Despite several attempts to get a Doctor Who film produced over the decades, only two Peter Cushing films were made, Dr. Who and the Daleks in 1965 and Daleks -- Invasion Earth: 2150 A.D. in 1966.  Both films were loose adaptations of television stories "The Daleks" and "The Dalek Invasion of Earth" that starred William Hartnell as the First Doctor.