Rule One -- The Moff lies.
Less than two weeks after Doctor Who showrunner Steven Moffat shot down the idea of a big-budget Doctor Who film, The Telegraph has revealed that -- Surprise! -- there will be a film made, after all. Sometime within the next eight years, anyway.
The article reports that leaked Sony emails that were published by WikiLeaks show that Danny Cohen, the Director of BBC Television, "claimed that the popular TV series will become a film under an eight-year plan to keep the franchise alive."
However, the Doctor Who team are "very hot under the collar" because they feel "their position on it is not being listened to or accepted." The article claims that they want to wait until the time is right and have made their feelings "very clear" on the matter.
In addition, Cohen claimed there is "tremendous interest" in a Doctor Who film and says there has been "pressure" to make it from BBC Worldwide, the subsidiary of the BBC that commercially exploits BBC brands and sells BBC programming abroad.
The details were included in a database of 30,287 documents and 173,132 emails that was uploaded to the WikiLeaks website after hackers stole them from Sony Pictures Entertainment, the company’s movie division, last November.
The movie plans were in an email sent in January last year from Andrea Wong, president of International Production for Sony, to the company’s chief executive, Michael Lynton. The email says: "He (Cohen) said that while there has been tremendous interest (and pressure from BBCWW) (BBC Worldwide) to do a Dr Who film, the show runners feel very clear that they don’t want to do one at this moment. That said, over the course of the coming months, the show running team is coming up with an 8 year timeline for the brand – laying out all that will happen with it. He says that a film will certainly be a part of that timeline. So the answer is that a film won’t happen in the next year to 18 months, but it is expected that it will happen after that within the 8 year horizon."
Lynton replied, "Sounds like we need to meet with the show runners."
Wong followed up, emailing: "Spoke to Danny and he doesn’t think it makes sense right now and actually might hurt our cause. He said that the creative team on the show have been having the movie conversation with BBC Worldwide in recent weeks and are very hot under the collar that their position on it is not being listened to or accepted."