Will The Doctor Join The MCU?
Would it really matter if he did?
As everyone who cares now knows, Disney have secured international distribution rights to Doctor Who via their Disney+ streaming service. The story goes that this will boost the budget for the programme and Disney have promised that creative control will remain in the hands of showrunner Russell T Davies, the Bad Wolf production company who make the show and the BBC, who commission it.
But there is an old saying that “He who pays the piper, calls the tune.” Disney are not known for a light touch, as can be seen by the control they maintain over their ‘partner’ Pixar. You can see in films such as The Incredibles, Lightyear and Turning Red that Pixar want to push the envelope in terms of story, character and theme, but keep getting reined in by Disney. Case in point being the daughter, Violet, in The Incredibles, who starts out as a proto-Goth but finds her ‘real’ self as a Popular girl who can date a jock. Would have been nicer, and more true-to-life, if she’d used her new-found confidence to assert her individuality and go full Goth, but Uncle Walt wouldn’t have liked that!
There is, thankfully, no way to integrate the themes and characters of Doctor Who into the Disneyverse at large!