Disney Still Remains Hopeful About Its Doctor Who Deal

Doctor Who‘s Disney+ era is still very much upon us; it began with the trio of 60th anniversary specials starring David Tennant as the Fourteenth Doctor (who looked not unlike the Tenth Doctor) and continued with Ncuti Gatwa’s recently concluded first season as the Fifteenth Doctor. There’s another confirmed Gatwa season on the way—but what will happen next, given all that talk of high budgets and low ratings? As of right now, it’s unclear… but there’s a glimmer of hope to dwell on today.

Liam Keelan, Disney’s senior vice president of original programming in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, made enthusiastic remarks about Doctor Who while speaking at the Edinburgh TV Festival, Deadline reports.

Though the trade notes Keelan did not “commit to renewing the BBC co-production deal beyond next year’s season, which is overseen by showrunner Russell T Davies,” he did have this to say: “[Doctor Who] is a fabulous series. Obviously, in the UK it’s fully BBC, rightly so. We take rest of world rights. But really, really happy to have it. I think just, the quirkiness of it, the fact that it’s in that sci-fi world and when you think about what Disney offers in other regards, I think it feels like a really good fit to me. I mean it’s great to have it.”

It’s clear Keelan isn’t the only Doctor Who fan at Disney these days, either; at last month’s San Diego Comic-Con, it was revealed that a new Doctor Who spin-off, The War Between Land and Sea, is currently in the works as another BBC-Disney co-production.

In io9’s SDCC reporting, we noted that the five-episode series will “follow an international crisis on Earth, when the Sea Devils—the ancient underwater race introduced in the 1972 classic ‘The Sea Devils,’ and most recently returned in the 2022 slightly less classic ‘Legend of the Sea Devils’—emerge from the oceans and reveal themselves to humanity on a global scale. Without the Doctor to help, UNIT steps in as humanity’s first and last line of defense… as war rears its head, threatening to plunge the world into chaos.”

Written by Davies and Pete McTighe, The War Between Land and Sea will star familiar Doctor Who faces Jemma Redgrave as UNIT’s Kate Lethbridge-Stewart and and Alexander Devrient as Colonel Ibrahim, as well as Russell Tovey and Gugu Mbatha-Raw as as-yet unrevealed characters. It’s currently filming, which means it won’t arrive stateside on Disney+ for awhile; Doctor Who, however, will be back with more Fifteenth Doctor adventures later this year, starting with Christmas special “Joy to the World.”

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