The most recent instalment in the James Bond cinema franchise, No Time To Die, was released in September 2021. It was well known that this was Daniel Craig’s last hurrah as 007; 53 years old when the film premiered, he was weary of the sheer physicality of action films, and had told The Guardian several years before that he would “rather slash my wrists” than do another Bond film. Yet, as is traditional, the closing credits of No Time To Die contained the words “James Bond will return”, even if the spy had seemingly met his end in the final sequence.
Change was inevitably in the air. In May 2021, Amazon had bought Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios, which owned the rights to the Bond franchise in partnership with Eon Productions. As part of the deal, creative control remained with Eon’s owners, Barbara Broccoli, daughter of long-time Bond producer Albert “Cubby” Broccoli, and her half-brother Michael G. Wilson, co-producer of 15 of the 25 “official” Bond films. Future instalments would be streamed on Amazon Prime but also given conventional theatrical releases.
Last week, however, it was announced that Amazon MGM Studios would assume full creative control of Bond. Broccoli and Wilson “remain co-owners of the franchise”, but Wilson, now 83, said that he was stepping back from producing to spend time on art and philanthropy. Broccoli, 64, will focus on “other projects”. This puts Amazon firmly in the driving seat, and its founder and chairman Jeff Bezos swiftly took to social media, asking fans: “Who’d you pick as the next Bond?”
Getting to the next Bond film
The question encapsulates the fact that there has been little obvious progress on making a new Bond film. The longest hiatus between instalments since the franchise began in 1962 was six years between Licence to Kill (1989) and GoldenEye (1995); during that time Cubby Broccoli, still producer, parted company with screenwriter Richard Maibaum and director John Glen; he became embroiled in a complex legal dispute over rights with MGM; Timothy Dalton, who had played Bond in the previous two films, was unwilling to commit to more than one more outing and resigned from the role; and, crucially for a narrative centred on a spy, the Cold War came to an end and the Soviet Union collapsed. Irish actor Pierce Brosnan was cast as the next 007 in 1994, having been forced to decline it when Roger Moore retired in 1986 because of an existing commitment in the television series Remington Steele.
It is all but inevitable that the length of time between No Time To Die and ‘Bond 26’ will be greater than that, and therefore record-setting. It is already three and a half years since the last film’s premiere, and, according to Variety, there is neither a script nor even an agreed story outline. No-one has been named to direct the next film, which in turn means no-one has been cast as the new James Bond. It is believed a character bible for the role is in circulation and some informal approaches have been made to the representatives of a number of actors, but all of these factors combine to mean that filming is understood to be at least a year away.
Bezos’s social media question is part of an evergreen parlour game in cinema which intensifies every time an actor steps away from the role: who will be the next James Bond? When Craig bowed out, this discourse became exceptionally fervent and multi-faceted, as many people asked whether it was “time” for someone other than a white male actor to take the lead. No Time To Die had teased audiences when Bond’s colleague Nomi, played by London-born Lashana Lynch, was assigned the codename 007 after Bond had supposedly retired: was this a foretaste of a female and/or non-white “James Bond”? Could Lynch herself take over the part? Even if a woman as Bond was a step too far—Barbara Broccoli, echoing her father’s views, has supposedly said that Bond must be a man and must be British—Idris Elba has long been discussed as a potential 007, though at 52 he is now almost certainly too old to take up the part; Bridgerton star Regé-Jean Page has also been suggested.
Even if another white male actor is cast, the array of names floated is dizzying. Given the likely length of contract, with Craig having made five films and Brosnan four, anyone over 40 has probably been crossed off the list: that means Aidan Turner (41), Jamie Dornan (42), Tom Hiddleston (44), Sam Heughan (44), Tom Hardy (47) and Cillian Murphy (48) are unlikely. Henry Cavill was under consideration before Daniel Craig was cast, and turned in an impressive screen test, but at that point was judged too young at 22; now, aged 41, he may perhaps have the opposite problem. At 39 and 38 respectively, James Norton and Richard Madden might have missed the boat. Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Jack Lowden have also been proposed, the latter especially given his success in the television adaptation of Mick Herron’s Slow Horses espionage thrillers.
It may be that, like Sean Connery when he was first cast for Dr. No, the producers will prefer an actor who is not yet a fully fledged, top-flight star, who can grow into and mould the part of Bond to his own interpretation without too many preconceptions. Into this category could fall Gangs of London star Sope Dirisu, 28-year-old Harris Dickinson, BAFTA-nominated for The King’s Man (2021), Bridgerton’s highly rated Jonathan Bailey and strong box-set performer Finn Bennett.
Another reason that Amazon MGM may err on the side of a younger actor is that the next Bond is likely to have to work harder than ever. Craig referred to the bone-crunching physicality of the role as one of the reasons for his exit: think of his perilous, heart-stopping chase along walls, across roofs and on to cranes in Madagascar in the early scenes of his first outing as Bond, Casino Royale. Another factor, however, and one which is at the heart of most discussion of Amazon MGM’s assumption of creative control, is a feeling that the Bond franchise could be exploited much more thoroughly, the assets sweated far more than they have been so far.
Sweating the assets
This may seem like an odd proposition. In some ways, it feels like James Bond has always been with us and drenches our collective national consciousness. Even people who have never seen a single Bond film—such people must surely, somewhere, exist—will recognise the name “James Bond”, perhaps the code name 007 and may be familiar with the guitar motif of Monty Norman’s inimitable theme music.
There is a solid bank of content already. Ian Fleming wrote 12 novels and two short story collections about the secret agent, the rights for which spawned the current catalogue of 25 “official” Bond films (as well as the silly 1967 parody Casino Royale and the perfectly serviceable Sean Connery-led Never Say Never Again of 1983). Since Fleming’s death in 1964, there have been 47 more books of various kinds as well as four short stories, including Kingsley Amis’s Colonel Sun (1968), 16 novels by versatile British thriller writer John Gardner, five “Young Bond” novels by actor and comedian Charlie Higson and a brilliant pastiche, Devil May Care (2008), by Sebastian Faulks.
The brand has made waves in other formats too. The first officially licensed computer game, James Bond 007, was released by Parker Brothers in 1984 for Atari and ColecoVision consoles and Commodore and Atari home computers. It had a number of sequels but the revolution in computer terms, as anyone who was in their teens in the 1990s will tell you, was Nintendo’s first-person shooter GoldenEye 007, released in 1997 and based on Pierce Brosnan’s first outing as Bond. It was an unexpected commercial and critical success, and became the third-best-selling Nintendo 64 game ever after Super Mario 64 and Mario Kart 64. The real success, however, was in the bottom line: GoldenEye 007 grossed $250 million worldwide, nearly three-quarters as much as the film itself, but cost 3.3 per cent of the film’s budget.
There have also been James Bond comics, merchandise and lucrative commercial linkages with, for example, Swiss watchmakers Omega SA, Land Rover, Nokia, Vodafone, Sunspel and Heineken. True to the aspirational and brand-heavy original novels, manufacturers know that an association with 007 is a powerful commercial driver.
Despite that weight of Bond, there are still some people who feel that the brand has been under-exploited. Looking at other franchises puts the phenomenon of Bond in perspective. Take Star Wars, for example: it is now 48 years since the first film, Star Wars, retroactively entitled Episode IV: A New Hope, was released in 1977. George Lucas made the initial trinity of films, returned to the world of Jedis and the Force to make three somewhat-unloved prequels between 1999 and 2005, then, in 2012, sold his production company, Lucasfilm, and with it the rights to the franchise, to Disney. Since then, there have been five more mainstream cinema releases, another is in post-production and at least three more are planned.
Star Wars also gave birth to nine animated television series, three of them still going; nine animated micro-series and shorts; seven live-action television series; upwards of 100 novels, novelisations and short stories, for adults, young adults and children; hundreds of comic books and graphic novels; and countless “reference” books. It is not merely because of the space setting that we talk of the Star Wars ‘universe’: creators, producers and fans have between them built a self-sufficient, all-encompassing world in which every event takes place, and there is no indication that the appetite of Star Wars fans is diminishing or becoming jaded.
If Star Wars is perhaps a behemoth of unique size, you need only look at other franchises like the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Star Trek (12 television series and 14 films) or Amazon MGM’s own The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power television series, the third season of which will begin filming later this year. These franchises bring in tens of billions of dollars, while Bond, more than 70 years after Ian Fleming published Casino Royale, has grossed around $7 billion. No wonder the money men think “could try harder”.
So what’s the problem?
It was rumoured to be profound disagreements over the exploitation of the brand which complicated and eventually ruptured the relationship between Barbara Broccoli and Michael G. Wilson on one side and Amazon MGM on the other. Broccoli and Wilson see Bond as a precious artefact, born of Ian Fleming’s novels, perhaps, but transformed into a worldwide cultural phenomenon through their father’s films.
Their vision was of one exhaustively planned and executed high-budget film at a time, each of them a major box-office event. Daniel Craig was snapped up to play 007 just as he joined the front rank of stars after performances like Sylvia (2003), Layer Cake (2004), Enduring Love (2004) and Munich (2005), critically acclaimed as well as commercially successful. For his five-film stint as Bond, he was directed by respected New Zealand veteran Martin Campbell, quirky and innovative German-Swiss Marc Forster, stage and screen titan Sir Sam Mendes and the versatile and well-regarded Cary Joji Fukunaga. These were not journeymen engaged to churn out a product. Broccoli and Wilson took Bond seriously.
Broccoli reportedly found Amazon to be, as she told friends, “fucking idiots”. She had previously described herself and Wilson as “the custodians” of Bond, and was incensed by Amazon’s description of the existing cinematic canon as “content”. Under the circumstances, it is hardly surprising that very little progress has been made on a new film; it is more of a wonder that Broccoli and Wilson managed not to fall out with Amazon sooner. Now, it seems, they have accepted the inevitable, and surrendered their fiercely protected creative control; no doubt they will have been handsomely remunerated, and it is likely they will continue to enjoy income from the franchise, whatever its future.
There is a basic issue of financial reality here. Making a James Bond film of the traditional kind is now mind-numbingly expensive: Casino Royale (2006) cost between $100 million and $150 million, while upper estimates for 2021’s No Time To Die are double that figure. All of the Daniel Craig instalments more than washed their faces, grossing hundreds of millions of dollars, and Skyfall (2012) broke the $1 billion barrier. But nothing is guaranteed, and Disney’s estimated loss of $143 million on 2023’s Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny spooked major studios, showing that no character or franchise, however beloved, is infallible.
For Amazon MGM, although it may chill the blood of Barbara Broccoli and devoted Bondians alike, Britain’s most famous spy is a commodity. Amazon paid $8.45 billion for MGM Studios five years ago, and while the venerable institution, founded in 1924, came with a back catalogue of 4,000 films and 17,000 television shows, Bond was the jewel in the crown. This desire for intellectual property was no secret. Mike Hopkins, senior vice-president of Prime Video and Amazon Studios, was explicit.
The real financial value behind this deal is the treasure trove of [intellectual property] in the deep catalog that we plan to reimagine and develop together with MGM’s talented team. It’s very exciting and provides so many opportunities for high-quality storytelling.
He was referring to a “treasure trove” which included the Pink Panther, Rocky and RoboCop, but none had the power of 007. Given that enormous price tag (it was Amazon’s second-largest acquisition ever, after paying $13.7bn for Whole Foods in 2017), the search for unexploited ideas was inevitable.
Wailing and gnashing of teeth
The inevitable reaction of some fans and Bond stars and contributors to Amazon MGM’s assumption of creative control has been one of dismay. The outgoing Bond, Daniel Craig, lavished praise on Broccoli and Wilson in a statement in which he declared that his “respect, admiration and love for Barbara and Michael remain constant and undiminished”. He made no mention of Amazon MGM or the future of the franchise.
Craig’s predecessor Timothy Dalton—for me, the best screen version of Bond and the truest to Fleming’s novels—confessed himself “very, very surprised and shocked”, and paid tribute to Barbara and Cubby Broccoli.
He was a very powerful and strong anchor for the project. Nothing went on that he didn’t want and it’s sad that he’s not with us any more, that’s all I can say. He was well in charge of the show and that’s not so any more. The movies have taken different courses over the years, but there is something very good about the original and I hope Amazon latch onto that and give us the kind of film that’s brought so much excitement and fun to so many people.
After this slightly mournful musing, he added, perhaps limply, “good luck to them, I say. I do wish them all the very, very best. They’ll be doing their best to make a lot of money, so hopefully they will make good movies.”
Neither Craig nor Dalton is a film-maker, however, and we should always be wary of putting too much weight on actors’ opinions when they stray beyond the boundaries of their brief. The more general anxiety is that, driven by a corporation owned by Jeff Bezos, regarded by few as a meticulous curator of cultural treasures, the Bond franchise will be overworked: too much content, too many spin-offs, a fall in the overall quality and a crass commercialisation in search of every last penny of profit.
We need to exercise a little caution on the subject of commercialisation: as I explored last August in commemoration of the 60th anniversary of Fleming’s death, a strong commercial element, the name-checking of brands and an early iteration of product-placement, was in the Bond novels from the very beginning. It was part of Fleming’s slightly boastful character but also an important factor in their popularity; it gave a readership in early 1950s Britain, the Second World War, rationing and austerity still very much alive in the memory, glimpses of luxury and exoticism.
A fall in quality? It is in the eye of the beholder, ultimately: I recently defended so-called “low” culture as just as capable of beauty, power and artistic and societal influence as that which we pre-judge to be “high” culture, and I would argue passionately that some of the Bond films are worthy of celebration and curation as fine films which stood out in their era. You will search long and hard to find a spy thriller as taut, well-acted and absorbing, with such loving cinematography and sense of dangerous glamour, as From Russia With Love (1963), or one so attuned to the last gasps of the still-deadly Cold War and an emerging world in which Britain would find its role questioned and undermined as 1987’s The Living Daylights. Equally, Sean Connery’s dark, powerful attraction in the early Bond films, menace barely concealed beneath the surface, showed cinema audiences something new as the world made the leap from the early 1960s, which were really the last hurrah of the 1950s, to the new existence of teenagers, pop music and technicolour.
Even a lifelong fan like I am will not defend every last second committed to film. Live and Let Die and Moonraker were occasionally painful attempts to acknowledge other contemporary cinema fashions—Blaxploitation and space adventures—which partially missed their mark; A View To A Kill (1985) had many enjoyable elements but with Roger Moore marking his 57th birthday during filming, there was a powerful sense that he had stayed for one film too many and the breathlessness was beginning to show; and, for all that I like Pierce Brosnan and thought GoldenEye was a boisterous return after a long hiatus, somehow the Irishman’s four films in the role blur together hazily and contain some laughable-for-the-wrong-reason moments (Madonna’s cameo as a fencing instructor in Die Another Day).
The future of Bond
I have a suspicion that what underlies many of the fears about the Bond franchise in Amazon MGM’s hands is uncertainty about the very nature of Bond a quarter of the way through the 21st century. This is not new: it is 30 years since Judi Dench’s M (a woman as head of the Secret Intelligence Service! It felt daring then, and in fairness has still not happened in real life), new to the job and instinctively hostile to Bond, called 007 “a sexist, misogynist dinosaur, a relic of the Cold War”. The producers have done well to find Bond new dragons to confront, from a power-crazed media mogul in Tomorrow Never Dies (1997) through an entrepreneur-turned-super-villain intent on controlling the supply of water in Quantum of Solace (2008) to No Time To Die‘s nihilistic bioterrorist.
It remains the case that the original IP is a hard-drinking, emotionally scarred, often-callous intelligence officer who served in the Second World War and made his public debut to British readers in April 1953. Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin had died a few weeks before, the United Kingdom had only tested its first nuclear weapon the previous October and Elizabeth II was yet to be crowned. It is not just a lifetime ago but several, an unimaginably distant world. If Bond has more or less kept up, while always remaining something of an anachronism and, in truth, revelling in the fact (“But James, I need you!” “So does England.”), that sense of doubt, that question over the character’s relevance, is perhaps more acute than it has ever been.
Employees of the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS, commonly known as MI6) have spent decades insisting that their lives are nothing like that of 007, that there is no such thing as a “licence to kill” and that real intelligence work is demanding, meticulous and often very unglamorous. It has always been a strange aspect of Bond’s role as a “secret agent” that he seems to be greeted in any luxury hotel anywhere around the world with smooth recognition and a murmured “Ah, Commander Bond, how good to see you again”. The real-life SIS currently uses the social media hashtag #secretlyjustlikeyou, a description which has never fitted Bond. As we look around at a world of cyberwarfare, hackers, drones, “grey zone” conflict and media manipulation, it can be hard to imagine where a well-dressed but relentless human killing machine quite fits in.
Some would like to see Bond reinvented in his original period, as stylish, retro, 1950s-based thrillers which would resolve the need for messy compromises and accommodation of modern mores. Others prefer a radical reimagination, with Bond as a woman, or as an identity which can be occupied by many different people, 007 merely being a placeholder code-name. Many will argue that constant but gradual reinvention has been the hallmark of the franchise so far and see no reason to think it will not continue to bear fruit.
If Amazon MGM allows a great explosion of new content, many of these ideas could be realised simultaneously: a stronger “young Bond” strand seems inevitable, prequels could encompass Bond’s early career, an in-period Bond could be an entirely separate entity and the canon could be mined for other characters to have their own moments of stardom. Miss Moneypenny, M’s devoted secretary, is the most obvious candidate, but others include Lashana Lynch’s Nomi, the current M, Gareth Mallory, a former SAS officer played by Ralph Fiennes, tech wizard Q (currently Ben Whishaw) and SIS’s dependable chief of staff Bill Tanner, originally portrayed by Fleming as the closest thing Bond has to a friend in the service.
One thing seems certain beyond peradventure. However Amazon MGM decides to develop and expand the 007 franchise, in whatever direction and under whoever’s guidance, Jeff Bezos will want a return on his multi-billion-dollar investment, and there will be no dignified retirement or cancellation. As the credits so often said, James Bond will return.
