Doctor Who’s Future and the Disney Deal: Sorting the Fact From the Fiction
Don’t panic, Mr Mainwaring?
Last week, Deadline published a report into the current health of Doctor Who and its international distribution deal with Disney that left some people spooked. The future of the Disney deal “hangs in the balance”, one anonymous source close to the production was reported as feeling; it “may not last beyond its initial two seasons”.
That’s a reasonable position to take because the deal was initially only made for two seasons and at the time of writing, no deal-renewal announcement has been made public. The deal’s future hangs in the balance in the same way that the future of a packet of Jaffa Cakes on a supermarket shelf hangs in the balance, because I’ve yet to buy and eat them – it hasn’t happened yet, and granted, it may not. (Except for the Jaffa Cakes, in which case it absolutely will.)
While casting doubt on the future of the Bad Wolf/BBC/Disney partnership, several online responses have repeated an error that was debunked 18 months ago, and reported as shadowy fan rumour something that showrunner Russell T Davies made public last December. To point any of this out isn’t to undermine the conclusions being drawn about Doctor Who’s potentially insecure future at Disney, it’s just to get the facts straight.
An Exaggerated Budget
First up: the budget. Deadline reports: “a Disney-driven budget boost that well-connected sources have estimated more than doubled the show’s per-ep investment to around the £10M ($13M) mark, with the deal valued by some at around £100M.” These figures have since been repeated by The Independent, The Telegraph, and more.
Some sources did indeed estimate this, and in January 2023, Russell T Davies and Bad Wolf executive producer Jane Tranter went on the record with Doctor Who Magazine to call the estimate inaccurate: “That has been exaggerated,” Davies told DWM. “If that was the budget, I’d be speaking to you from my base on the Moon.”
“That is not the budget,” Davies continued, “and I worry that misinformation like that creates false expectation. Nonetheless, we have a lovely, handsome budget, and we’re very happy with how we’re proceeding with it.”
Tranter reiterated that Bad Wolf were happy with the newly Disney-backed purse, describing it as “a really good budget for us” but emphasising that they “are not Game of Thrones. Or The Rings of Power.” So, Doctor Who isn’t costing Disney quite as much as some are suggesting.
Disney Editorial Meddling?
How far Disney’s influence would extend editorially over Doctor Who has worried some fans since the distribution deal was announced. Would Disney insist on the addition of, say, a comedy robot dog, or a blonde teenage girl to the franchise, thereby ruining Doctor Who forever?
One instance of Disney’s editorial interference cited in the Deadline piece is the inclusion of the scene in 2023 Christmas special “The Church on Ruby Road” in which the Doctor is nearly crushed by a giant decorative snowman, and then has a sweet exchange with a passing police officer about a planned marriage proposal. That scene having been included at Disney’s behest to provide exposition for new American viewers is being reported as a spreading rumour. The chief culprit spreading that ‘rumour’? Showrunner Russell T Davies, who shared it publicly as a behind-the-scenes factoid in the in-episode commentary on BBC iPlayer in December 2023.
According to Davies, Disney asked for the Doctor to be introduced earlier into the episode, and so the snowman scene was added (after the Esmie Jikiemi-Pearson episode Target novelisation had already been finished and copy-edited, confirms DWM 605). It was less Doctor-exposition for new American viewers than Doctor-exposure, and less insider-gossip than simple… fact.
Disney’s Priority List
The Deadline piece’s opening gambit, since repeated by other outlets, is that Doctor Who having been “almost completely absent” from Disney’s 2024 upfronts (live events where a network, channel or streamer’s new content is trailed for advertisers and press), “may spin a yarn about the series’ position in the Disney priority log.” Disney’s 2024 event was held on Tuesday May 15, four days after Gatwa’s new season’s international debut on Friday May 11. A lack of fanfare for Doctor Who at the event could well suggest a low place among Disney’s priorities, but that place can’t have been affected by the ratings performance being cited as a reason for a perceived current lack of excitement from Disney. Yes, this is a time travel show, but when the upfronts happened, that ratings data didn’t yet exist.
While we’re talking fanfare, there’s little mention in this discussion about Doctor Who’s imminent return to a panel at San Diego Comic-Con’s Hall H (Friday July 26, 12:30 – 1:30 PDT), or of the crossover-episode speculation caused by Russell T Davies joining Star Trek producer Alex Kurtzman at a joint Trek-Who “Intergalactic Friendship” panel (Saturday July 27).
Back to those ratings. A comparison widely repeated in the last week is that the average audience of the last full series led by Jodie Whittaker in 2021 was higher than that of the first led by Gatwa. That’s undeniable, but does fail to mention the fairly important context that Whittaker’s series aired in October and November, when British TV viewing figures are higher as a whole than in the sports-dominated summer months of May and June, when Gatwa’s episodes aired. (With the caveat that this is a more indicative than exhaustive figure: the total number of viewers across BARB’s top 50 shows for the week each of those two series debuted drops by 67 million between October 2021 and May 2024.) Nobody could possibly call the 2024 episodes a hit based on their viewing figures, but the overall picture of (more siloed, lower overall) TV ratings has shifted so decisively in recent years that it’s becoming increasingly meaningless to draw total-value comparisons without taking such context into account.
What Happens if the Disney Deal isn’t Renewed?
The major scare of this discussion is the prophesied catastrophe of the Disney deal not being renewed: “If the BBC-Disney deal doesn’t get re-upped, jaws could hit the floor,” worried the Deadline piece and multiple other reports. They might, yes, but it wouldn’t automatically signal the end of Doctor Who. On March 26 2024, speaking on the They Like to Watch podcast, showrunner Russell T Davies said:
“If Disney collapsed tomorrow and we had to go back to making Doctor Who on a normal BBC budget, you know what? We’d all rally round and make it and suddenly the stories would become claustrophobic ghost stories.
“A lot of people would like that very much, so I’m not saying you have to have [the Disney deal] happen. But while it’s happening elsewhere, I think it’s unfair that it doesn’t happen to Doctor Who.”
In conclusion then, what do we know as fact, and what’s still unknown?
We know: Filming has wrapped on the next season/series of Doctor Who and we’ll watch it in 2025, on the BBC in the UK and on Disney+ around the world. A Christmas special guest-starring Nicola Coughlan will air in December 2024 (they won’t confirm it’s December 25th yet, but it will be December 25th). Doctor Who will have a Hall H panel at SDCC 2024 where we’ll get a tease of what’s coming up. A spinoff The War Between the Land and the Sea is expected to start filming later this year, but has yet to be officially announced. Ncuti Gatwa is in a play until the end of January 2025, so filming on his third run wouldn’t begin until February of that year at the earliest. He’s spoken in interviews about taking “a break” between Doctor Who seasons rather than exiting the show after his second run.
We don’t yet know for absolute sure: if the Disney international distribution deal will continue. If Ncuti Gatwa will appear in a third run, though we really, really hope that he does. If Anita Dobson’s Mrs Flood has been raiding the BBC costume archive. If I’m going to go and have a Jaffa Cake. (Spoiler: I absolutely am). Before doomsaying, let’s wait and see?
Doctor Who series 14 is available to stream on BBC iPlayer in the UK and on Disney+ around the world.
Written by
Louisa Mellor is the Den of Geek UK TV Editor. She has written about TV, film and books for Den of Geek since 2010, and for…