(Just as surprising as the choice of Jackson as a Doctor-to-be is the studio's rumored second choice: Bill Cosby. Clearly, no one at Paramount had seen Leonard, Part 6.)

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Even without Jackson or Cosby's involvement, the notion of a Who movie from Paramount could raise a few eyebrows. After all, at this time, the studio already had one successful science-fiction franchise under its belt with the Star Trek movies, while elsewhere Universal was successfully building its own time-travel franchise, Back to the Future. With that kind of environment, it's not impossible that a Who movie series could have actually managed to be a success.

Certainly, the timing would've been fortuitous had things worked out. In 1989, a year after Paramount was mulling the idea, Doctor Who went off the air in the U.K. Instead of jumping dimensions from television to movie, Sylvester McCoy's third and final season as the show's seventh Doctor ended up being the last time audiences would have their weekly fill of wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey-ness until the series was revived in 2005, notwithstanding Fox's failed Who pilot in 1996. Where's a good time machine when you need one?