The film will be separate to the long running tv series and take it's own fresh approach. Peter Cushing famously played a movie version of the Doctor (who was a human and not an alien as in the series) in two films in the 60's, that was a seperate canon to the whoniverse which was being broadcast at the time on television.
Yates has this to say regarding his planned adpation:
"We're looking at writers now. We're going to spend two to three years to get it right," he said. "It needs quite a radical transformation to take it into the bigger arena."
"The notion of the time-travelling Time Lord is such a strong one, because you can express story and drama in any dimension or time,"
"Russell T. Davies and then Steven Moffat have done their own transformations, which were fantastic, but we have to put that aside and start from scratch,"
