The Real Reason Disney Walked Away From Doctor Who

Disney is out of the Doctor Who business. Earlier this week, the company said it would not be teaming with the BBC on future seasons. Now we have the why of it all, and the reasons are exactly the mix you think they are: numbers, money, and culture wars.

What went wrong, according to a new Deadline report

• Ratings: The two Disney+ seasons did not deliver. The most recent run, which kicked off in April 2025, didn't even show up on Nielsen or Luminate's weekly streaming charts. Across both seasons led by Ncuti Gatwa, viewership never matched the 2021 Jodie Whittaker season.
• Budget: The show got expensive under the Disney arrangement, with estimates landing between $8.5 million and $9.2 million per episode. That spend was hard to justify without the audience to match.
• Politics: Sources say Disney worried the show's more overtly inclusive storytelling had become a liability in a MAGA-era U.S. market, with one person bluntly calling it "too woke for Trump's USA." That reportedly weighed on renewal talks, especially in light of how Disney handled the Jimmy Kimmel suspension.

The ratings problem

Deadline's sources say the Disney+ era never found its audience at the scale they expected. Not charting with Nielsen or Luminate at all this spring is a rough look for a flagship sci-fi brand, especially one Disney helped relaunch worldwide. Gatwa has now exited after two seasons, and one source even questioned whether he embraced the off-screen part of the job.

"There is more to that role than performing," a source told Deadline. "You have got to be an ambassador for the brand and embrace being that generation's Doctor. Matt Smith and David Tennant fully understood the responsibility it carried."

The cost question

When your per-episode budget creeps toward $9 million and the show still isn't registering on the charts, executives start doing math. Some of the most beloved Doctor Who episodes were made for far less, and a former exec argued the series actually benefitted from constraints.

"Budget limitations used to help the idiosyncrasies of the show. Big budgets can cause a problem."

The political heat

Under showrunner Russell T. Davies, the series leaned into broader representation and story choices: bringing in transgender actress Yasmin Finney, and even featuring a kiss between Gatwa and Jonathan Groff. For some viewers, that's a feature. For others, it's fuel. One Deadline source put it like this:

"Too woke for Trump's USA."

Sources also suggested Disney's recent handling of the Jimmy Kimmel suspension factored into how cautious the company was feeling about culture-war flashpoints when it came time to discuss a renewal.

What's next

Disney's Doctor Who stint ends after two seasons, plus one more title still to come: a spin-off called The War Between The Land and the Sea. After that, the next version of Doctor Who arrives as a Christmas special in 2026, with the BBC moving forward without Disney as a partner.