BBC Report Film & SONY leak
Plans for a Hollywood version of Doctor Who are part of the latest revelations from the Sony Pictures’ computer hack.
The BBC said there was “tremendous interest” in the idea during a meeting with Sony last year, although no plans were finalised.
The meeting was disclosed in a hacked email, made public on Wikileaks, six months after a cyber-attack on Sony.
Wikileaks has made the information stolen from Sony available in a searchable format for the first time.
Sony said it “strongly condemns” the release, which amounts to more than 170,000 emails and 30,000 documents.
The new documents reveal more about the internal wranglings at Sony’s film division but, so far, nothing is as embarrassing as the previously-released material.
Last year, Sony’s co-chairman Amy Pascal and producer Scott Rudin came under fire for a series of racially-insensitive emails about Barack Obama’s taste in films, which were among the first to be leaked.
Rudin was also exposed for calling Angelina Jolie “minimally talented” and a “spoiled brat”.
A Doctor Who film is on the way….
There is “tremendous interest” in a Doctor Who film, said the BBC’s director of television, Danny Cohen, in a conversation reported by Sony’s international chief Andrea Wong.
The pair discussed the big-screen adaptation in January 2014, but Cohen warned that the programme’s show runners, including Steven Moffat, “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,” Ms Wong explained in an email to Michael Lynton, Sony Entertainment CEO.
“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.”
Mr Lynton replied: “Sounds like we need to meet with the show runners”, but Ms Wong warned him off, saying that too much pressure “actually might hurt our cause”.
“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,” she added.