Calling Dr. Beatty

Some critics took shots at Warren Beatty’s performance as straight-laced cop “Dick Tracy,” complaining that he paled alongside the big-budget, effects-laden picture’s colorful villains.

For his follow-up film, Beatty may have a prescription for those critical ailings: He trades in his machine gun for a stethoscope to star in “The Doctor,” which a Disney spokeswoman calls “an intimate, character-driven drama.”

Scheduled to begin shooting in the fall on a “moderate budget” for Disney’s Touchstone Pictures, “The Doctor” has Beatty as a successful doctor and family man who is himself hospitalized, getting a patient’s-eye view of his profession, and reassessing his own bedside manner.

Randa Haines directs for producer Laura Ziskin, with screenwriter Robert Caswell adapting a nonfiction book, “A Taste of His Own Medicine,” by Dr. Ed Rosenbaum.