Doctor Who thing of the day: Moffat denies Hollywood reboot, but don’t breathe easy yet

To clarify: any Doctor Who movie would be made by the BBC team, star the current TV Doctor and certainly NOT be a Hollywood reboot.

And then:

Movie thing: David Yates, great director, was speaking off the cuff, on a red carpet. You've seen the rubbish I talk when I'm cornered.

Um, what? Yates sounded pretty sure of himself a couple weeks ago:

Yates, who directed the last four Potter films, told Daily Variety that he is about to start work on developing a "Doctor Who" movie with Jane Tranter, head of L.A.-based BBC Worldwide Prods.

"We're looking at writers now. We're going to spend two to three years to get it right," he said. "It needs quite a radical transformation to take it into the bigger arena."

This is pretty specific for an off-the-cuff comment.

So what the heck is going on?

I fear Rob Bricken at Topless Robot may have the right of it:

What's weird is that Yates made his announcement on November 14th, and Moffat only responded earlier today, December 2nd. I see one of two possibilities here: the first is that after Yates said his spiel, Moffat went to the BBC, tore them a new one, and swore he would quit Who if they didn't get their shit straight and make the Who movie in regular contin-Who-ity. These discussions/threats took a couple of weeks, but the BBC acquiesced, and only today did Moffat feel confident enough to announce that any Who movie would be based on the TV series.

That's one possibility. The other is that Moffat is out of the loop, because he works on the Doctor Who TV show, and not with BBC Worldwide, who are in charge of the movie. Maybe Moffat's bosses at the Beeb are telling him it will be fine, but meanwhile Yates and his partner Jane Tranter, BBC Worldwide's L.A.-based exec VP of programming and production, are asking Jason Statham if he'd be interested in being a Time Lord.

I don't know which is more likely, honestly, but I don't think we're out of the woods yet.

I’m with Bricken: We probably shouldn’t be breathing any sighs of relief just yet.

(If you stumble across a cool Doctor Who thing, feel free to email me with a link.)