Doctor Who Director Says “Something Went Wrong” With Disney Deal
A former Doctor Who director says that while the BBC's Disney partnership may have been lucrative for the franchise, it didn't result in a stronger show.
If the past is anything to go by, Doctor Who fans are going to be rehashing the fallout from the BBC’s failed partnership with Disney for a long, long time. There are still debates raging about why Doctor Who was originally cancelled back in 1989 and why the 1996 film failed, after all. But the mess that happened with the House of Mouse is genuinely next level.
After much initial hype, the much vaunted new production partnership fizzled out after just two seasons, leaving the franchise scrambling for a new direction and without a lead actor in its signature role. (And that’s not even counting the entire spinoff that Disney appears to have shelved in the U.S. for the foreseeable future.) And Peter Hoar, who directed season 15 episodes “The Robot Revolution” and “Lucky Day,” has a rather blunt view of the reasons behind the “well-publicized dropping off” of the series.
In a recent interview with Deadline about his plans to reboot the classic sci-fi series Blake’s 7, he cites the most recent era of Doctor Who as something of a cautionary tale, pointing out that neither the bigger budgets that came with the Disney partnership didn’t necessarily improve the series’ quality.
“I don’t think anybody would doubt the skills at the front line of that show, but something went wrong,” he said. “I think there were lots of areas you could point fingers at, but ultimately it wasn’t a better show with more money,” he said. “And that’s a good thing, because we haven’t got the money anymore, nobody has.”
Most Whovians have likely suspected what Hoar says to be true for a while, in fact. Sure, the show has probably never looked better than it did during the Disney seasons, but a whole lot about this partnership just feels as though it was all extremely sus, particularly during star Ncuti Gatwa’s second year.
Per his own admission, showrunner Russell T. Davies was working on scripts for another season with the Fifteenth Doctor as early as the summer of 2024 and was “very confident” that the show — despite not having been renewed yet — would likely be shooting the following winter. Even Gatwa seemed to be planning for at least one more ride in the TARDIS. None of that happened — in fact, Disney became increasingly vague about their plans for the show’s future, hedging their bets about any potential renewal and refusing to comment one way or the other until season 15 finished airing.
It’s clear something happened. But what? Anonymous reports immediately following the break-up announcement pointed to everything from ratings woes and expensive budgets to Davies’s penchant for diverse storytelling as reasons for the partnership’s decline. The show also reportedly struggled to bring new viewers into the franchise, and negative fan reaction to both [admittedly messy] season finales certainly hasn’t helped matters.
Doctor Who will get a chance (yet again!) to reinvent itself later this year, with a Christmas special that must deal with the Billie Piper-shaped mystery that the finale “The Reality War” left behind. What the new iteration of the series will look like — or who will star in it — is anyone’s guess. But it certainly sounds like it’s past time for a fresh start.