Even a Time Lord (or a guy who’s spent a great deal of his career wrangling Time Lords) can’t confirm when Doctor Who will return. But the BBC has made assurances we’ll see the TARDIS again, with or without Disney assistance, and while viewers may have had mixed feelings about the Fifteenth Doctor’s farewell, there’s still a ton of goodwill for Doctor Who as a franchise. Fans want to see it succeed, and two of the show’s most beloved stars have an idea of what might be the way forward.
As the Radio Times reports, David Tennant (the Tenth and Fourteenth Doctor) and Billie Piper (who played Rose Tyler and was last seen regenerating out of Ncuti Gatwa, somehow) were at the recent Los Angeles Comic Con and agreed they’d love to do a Doctor Who movie.
“I always was pitching for that,” Piper said. “Where’s the film? … I loved it that people went to see the last Doctor Who episode [‘The Reality War’] in the cinema. I just loved that. I would love the Doctor Who experience on the big screen. They’re sort of like films anyway. But yeah, I’d do that. Wouldn’t you?”
“Oh, for sure, yeah,” Tennant said. “We’re available!”
You can’t tell from that brief exchange if the stars had a TV movie in mind—or an actual Peter Cushing-style theatrical production. It does make a certain amount of sense, though, to shake up the formula as a sort of reset before Doctor Who returns to its episodic roots. You can almost see the Dalek and TARDIS-shaped popcorn buckets.
While we ponder Doctor Who‘s uncertain future on screens, it lives on in comics—as well as a five-episode spin-off series, The War Between Land and Sea, coming to the BBC and Disney+ sometime next year.