New Doctor Who Trailer Shows Off The Visual Effects Disney Money Can Buy
Goodbye, upside-down dustbins with toilet plungers glued on the front, hello, CGI dinosaurs! Okay, so "Doctor Who" has had CGI dinosaurs before (plus some fun old-school puppet dinos in the Jon Pertwee-era adventure "Invasion of the Dinosaurs"), but it's clear from this new trailer for the upcoming season of "Doctor Who" that returning showrunner Russell T. Davies is playing with a much bigger budget than he had during his original "Doctor Who" revival.
That's thanks to a co-production deal that makes Disney+ the new home of the long-running sci-fi series (outside of the U.K. and Ireland, where it will continue to air on BBC channels and platforms). The Disney deal means that "Doctor Who" now has vastly bigger budgets to play with, though the trade-off is that Disney gets a vote in the show's creative decisions.
Leading us into the Disney NuWho era is a new Doctor played by Ncuti Gatwa, whose maxed-out charisma stats made him the breakout star of Netflix's "Sex Education." Somewhat confusingly, Gatwa is the fourteenth actor to play the lead Doctor, but is officially playing the Fifteenth Doctor due to some shenanigans involving David Tennant being simultaneously the Tenth Doctor and the Fourteenth Doctor. Also, though this is the 14th season of the NuWho era, it's officially being branded as "season 1." There's a good reason for that, at least.
Welcome to the Tardis, we got fun and games!
When a show has been around for as long as "Doctor Who" has (and there aren't many shows that have been around as long as "Doctor Who"), it will eventually run into the problem of having so much history that newcomers will be reluctant to jump in. Fortunately, Russell T. Davies has dealt with and overcome this exact challenge once before, when he reintroduced "Doctor Who" to a new generation with the 2005 revival, led by Christopher Eccleston as the Doctor and Billie Piper as companion Rose Tyler.
The "Doctor Who" 60th anniversary specials did the work of helping the Doctor shed some baggage by splitting him into two people when he regenerated: one played by David Tennant, who is off somewhere having adventures in his own Tardis, and the shiny new Doctor played by Gatwa. Add a shiny new companion, Ruby Sunday (Millie Gibson), who conveniently will need to be given a rundown of who the Doctor is and what the Tardis does, and you have a recipe that says, "welcome, Who-newcomers!"
A soft reboot is exactly what "Doctor Who" needs to bring back lapsed viewers and invite the next generation into the blue police box — but it'll take some quality timey-wimey magic to keep them there. We'll find out if the magic is present soon enough. The new season of "Doctor Who" premieres May 10, 2024, on Disney+.