8) Missed Opportunities
When Doctor Who came back in 2005, one of the first people approached to direct the episode Rose was Edgar Wright (or so he says in his Reddit AMA). Now imagine what direction the show would’ve gone in and how it would have looked like had that panned out. Unfortunately, Wright was busy with Shaun of the Dead at the time, which helped define his career, so perhaps it wasn’t such a bad decision to decline after all.
Still, it’s difficult not to wonder what would have happened if Wright had said yes. For one thing, Christopher Eccleston might have stayed on for more than a year, because if rumors are to believed, one of the main reasons for his departure was not getting on with the director of Rose, Keith Boak.
Of course, for all we know nothing might have changed and everything could’ve stayed the same. Regardless, here’s hoping that we see Edgar Wright do Doctor Who some day.
But that’s not the only missed opportunity here. Apparently, both J.K. Rowling and Stephen Fry almost wrote for the show. Rowling was approached to write in 2005, but was too busy working on Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. Fry, on the other hand, had already written an episode for Series 2, but when moved to Series 3, he never found the time to make the appropriate changes and revisions.